Among the moments that marked Blake Butera’s journey from Chestnut Hill to a major league dugout was a picture-perfect Marathon Monday in April 2014, when the region’s second-most-famous game that day — the Baseball Beanpot — offered an impromptu glimpse of his on-field savvy.
Now, Butera is the manager of the Washington Nationals, hired this offseason as a key voice in that organization’s overhaul. Back then, he was Boston College’s second baseman.
Greg Sullivan, then and now an assistant coach for BC, remembers the play clearly: Northeastern had a runner on second after a leadoff double. The next batter, a speedster whose presence in the box drew the infield in a tad, shot a hard one-hopper to Butera.
Instead of taking the routine out at first base, Butera turned and fired to third, surprising everybody — including coaches on both sides, but especially the lead runner.
“It was one of those plays where you’re coaching third, you assume the runner is going to advance, and it’s almost like an optical illusion,” Northeastern coach Mike Glavine said. “I don’t think I could even get any words out to help our runner.”
Sullivan said, “And the runner didn’t even slide. He was just out. And Mike Glavine looked at the runner, and the runner looked at Glav and was like, ‘I don’t know what to tell you.’ That’s a high-level play … For a college kid to make it without skipping a beat, it speaks to how ahead Blake was of everybody around him.”
To Sullivan, the shrewd move was representative of Butera’s skills, smarts, and guts — a key combo in his new job with the Nationals, and reasons he became, at age 33, the majors’ youngest manager in more than a half-century.
“Everyone associated with BC baseball is pretty pumped,” said Joe Cronin, a BC teammate who is a major league hitting strategist for the Red Sox. “Obviously, [Butera’s quick climb] was surprising. But if you know the kid … it’s really not. It’s something that we could all see coming.”
BC baseball people view Butera not just as one of them. He is one of the best of them.
Consider: Butera wore No. 3. When the Eagles wanted to retire the number in honor of Pete Frates, they waited until 2016, the first season after Butera had moved on to the pro ranks.
“It was Pete’s idea to let Blake finish,” Sullivan said of Frates, the ALS awareness activist, and former BC captain, who died in 2019. “I know it meant a lot to Blake that Blake got to finish out his career. We didn’t take it off Blake’s back.”
In the beginning, Boston College hadn’t been Butera’s plan. The Louisiana native initially was recruited to Virginia Tech by Mike Gambino. When Gambino (now at Penn State) got the top job at BC, Butera followed him — and realized the importance of staying warm.
“I didn’t know winter coats were a thing,” Butera said. “I just wore a bunch of sweat shirts. I quickly learned that doesn’t work.”
It helped that the family had baseball-specific ties to the area. Butera’s father, Barry, was a Red Sox draft pick in 1977 and played for Triple A Pawtucket in 1979-80. His brother, also Barry Butera, played at BC from 2007-09.
The youngest Butera suited up for BC during some lean years, 2012-15. That experience may help him now amid the Nationals’ rebuild under president of baseball operations Paul Toboni, who until September was an assistant general manager for the Red Sox.
“Early on [at BC], it was how to deal with failure a lot, that’s for sure,” Butera said. “Coming out of high school, you’re just so used to having success every night that you can kind of get woken up a little bit in college with how hard it is, specifically playing in the ACC.”
Still, Sullivan and Cronin credited Butera, a captain in 2015, with laying the groundwork for what the 2016 squad accomplished, making it to the NCAA Tournament Super Regionals in the Eagles’ best season in a decade.
“He was a pro — a very much lead-by-example kind of guy. He certainly was not a rah-rah type of leader,” Cronin said. “You could see in there that, if he wanted to, he was probably going to have a long career. Whether that was on the field or in the front office, you always knew he was going to stay in the game. He was pretty passionate about it. He always carried himself like a pro.”
Butera said, “Ideally, I’d be playing in the big leagues for 15 years and never have to work again. But as we know, as we get older, it doesn’t necessarily work that way. I thought when I was done playing, I would get into coaching. I just didn’t know at what level — high school, college, professional. I wasn’t sure. I just knew I wanted to be involved in the game in some capacity.”
Drafted by the Rays at No. 1,048 overall in 2015, Butera gave it a go in the minors, playing in parts of two seasons. Then the Tampa Bay bosses had an idea: How about coaching?
That kicked off a new career, in which he moved quickly: bench coach in the lower minors for one year to managing in the minors (beginning at age 25) for several years to overseeing all of player development for the past two seasons. Then Toboni came calling with a big league job.
“Blake’s character and ability to connect with everyone across the baseball spectrum is second to none,” Toboni said at the introductory news conference.
The Nationals come to Boston in late June for a series against the Red Sox. Already, Butera has a pair of visits on his agenda, at opposite ends of the Green Line: the North End for Italian food, and Boston College because it’s been a while.
All this has given Sullivan an excuse to tell the latest generation of Eagles about one of his favorite things: The Blake Butera Play.
Glavine, meanwhile, still coaches third base for Northeastern — and still tells runners to hustle to the bag.
“That’s freaking just amazing,” Glavine said. “It’s a play that I don’t think I ever saw before, and I haven’t seen it since.”
Sullivan said, “It’ll be no different in the manager’s seat. He sees things before they happen.”
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