{"id":671079,"date":"2026-04-08T22:38:23","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T22:38:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/671079\/"},"modified":"2026-04-08T22:38:23","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T22:38:23","slug":"blake-butera-says-hes-been-surprised-by-nationals-bullpen-struggles-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/671079\/","title":{"rendered":"Blake Butera Says He&#8217;s Been Surprised by Nationals Bullpen Struggles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The story for the Washington Nationals the last week has been about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.si.com\/mlb\/nationals\/onsi\/news\/nationals-flaws-display-throughout-three-game-sweep-dodgers\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">the struggles of their bullpen<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Instead of this young team sitting with a winning record 11 games into the season, their relief staff has directly been responsible for three losses against the Philadelphia Phillies, Los Angeles Dodgers and St. Louis Cardinals. This was an issue last year, as well. And unfortunately, the front office regime change didn&#8217;t result in a competent bullpen being built.<\/p>\n<p>How things get fixed isn&#8217;t clear. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.si.com\/mlb\/nationals\/onsi\/news\/nationals-bullpen-disaster-not-much-can-be-done-fix-it\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Barring a major change in philosophy<\/a> from the top down, there is not an easy path to fielding a unit that can be consistently competent against major league hitters. But what&#8217;s interesting is the Nationals seem to be surprised by what has taken place. At least that&#8217;s what the comments made by manager Blake Butera suggest.<\/p>\n<p>Blake Butera Did Not See These Bullpen Struggles Coming<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The story for the Washington Nationals the last week has been about the struggles of their bullpen. Instead&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671080,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2398],"tags":[5,4,415,414,71,4222],"class_list":{"0":"post-671079","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-washington-nationals","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-mlb","10":"tag-nationals","11":"tag-washington","12":"tag-washington-nationals","13":"tag-washingtonnationals"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116371489296208510","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671079\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}