MLB's youngest manager Blake Butera is first of his kind. Are Blakes the future?

When Blake Butera scrawls out his Opening Day lineup – he’s gone through “seven or eight” iterations already – and heads out to the Wrigley Field first-base line March 26, managerial history will be made. Sure, at 33, he’ll be the youngest major league manager since 1972, a fact he and his Washington Nationals charges would prefer fade into the background. Yet there’s another bit of managerial minutiae that symbolically indicates the game is moving firmly into the Millennial era, with Gen Z coming up quickly, as well.

Butera will be the first big league manager named Blake. He was mildly tickled when learning this factoid, though perhaps an oversize check or, better yet, a proven bullpen and a full-time first baseman might have been more thrilling. “Anytime you’re the first of something,” he muses to USA TODAY Sports, “it’s kind of a cool opportunity.

” Opportunity is what the Nationals sold to Butera, a highly valued member of the Tampa Bay Rays who wore many hats in the organization – from Carolina League manager to senior director of player development – and now finds himself in a big league manager’s office. And while names and labels aren’t everything, a Blake planting his flag in one of the game’s most coveted positions isn’t exactly nothing. Out with the Bruces, in with the Blakes Butera, you see, was born in an era of Peak Blake: The name did not appear on the Social Security Administration’s top 200 names for baby boys through the 1960s and ‘70s.

But the Blakes broke through in the ‘80s, landing at No. 116 and reaching their apex in the 1990s at No. 84.