WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Blake Butera is in his first year as a Major League manager for the Nationals, but for the 33-year-old, baseball has been a focal point of his entire life. In Part 1 of this two-part Q&A, MLB.com chatted one-on-one with Butera about the game that began as a childhood passion and blossomed into a professional career, being a fan of other sports and more. Check back tomorrow for Part 2 to learn more about Butera off the field.
MLB.com: Let’s go back in the day. What was it like growing up in Madisonville, La.?
Butera: It’s a small town. My dad owns an elementary school, like a private elementary school, so I went to his school from kindergarten through eighth grade. There were 30 people in my class, a small school but a big baseball school. They've had like 11 or 12 players drafted from that small school. I grew up in a baseball family. My dad played with the Red Sox and my older brother played with the Astros. There was a lot of seafood, a lot of Mardi Gras. Typical how you'd envision New Orleans and the South, that was it.
MLB.com: What were some of your favorite activities as a kid?
Butera: We played all the sports growing up. When it was basketball season, we played basketball; when it was football season, we played football; then when it was baseball season, we played baseball. So we just played everything. Obviously, there's a lot of water in Louisiana, so a lot of water sports like tubing and skiing and stuff like that. We’d go out on the boat, we tried to fish a little bit, but a lot of it was just around sports.
All my friends, family, we always were playing in the backyard, playing sports and stuff like that or eating crawfish or seafood. Those are the days I remember the most -- the warm spring, summer evenings. You’ve just finished playing a game and then everyone goes and there’s a crawfish boil and hangs out. You go play touch football after. Those were the normal evenings, it was fun.
MLB.com: With your dad having been drafted by the Red Sox, how would you describe the role that baseball played in your family?
Butera: From birth, a ball was always being thrown around the house, we were breaking stuff in the house (laughs). My mom would yell at us; my dad said it was OK because it was a ball -- if it was something else, it'd be a problem. A lot of broken bones and stitches and hospital visits, because we'd play sports in the house and somebody would get hurt.
It was just a lot of fun. What I tell a lot of my friends and people that didn't know me growing up is, you would lose your mind at what we did when we were kids. We had a three-car garage at our house, and my dad carpeted the whole thing. Then we had wrestling mats in there, we had basketball goals, we had a net you could hit balls into. So it was like the whole inside-outside of the house was either a basketball court, a football field, we had a pond there. All the friends came over to the house and we just would play sports all day long.
MLB.com: What was your first job?
Butera: When I was playing in the Cape Cod League, they paid me to rake the field and stuff before the games. I swept the dugouts, watered the field, dragged dirt. Actually, all the players did that. If you wanted to make some money, they needed people to do it. So five, six, seven of us signed up to do that. (I did that) for two summers, and then when I was drafted, in the offseason, I did lessons for kids and stuff.
MLB.com: What is either the first or the most meaningful sporting event you've been to as a fan?
Butera: My older brother played at Boston College, and they played at the University of Texas in a regional. It’s still today the longest college baseball game of all time. It was 25 innings at the University of Texas, and I was there for that one. It was awesome. Brandon Belt was on that team. There were two relievers that threw over nine innings in a game. It was wild. The final score was 3-2 (with Texas winning). That one is the most memorable. I tell Tres Barrera about that one all the time because he went there.
I've been to the World Series in Boston when the Red Sox played the Dodgers in 2018. I went to one game at Fenway for that World Series. A while ago, Hawaii had a good football team. Colt Brennan was a quarterback, and they went to the Sugar Bowl and played Georgia. I was a huge Hawaii fan because they were good and nobody knew about them. They went to the Sugar Bowl, so my dad got me tickets to the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans.
Check back tomorrow for Part 2 of this Q&A.