The latest hire in the Washington Nationals’ youthful experiment grew up with a baseball obsession so strong his parents had to set limits.
Anirudh Kilambi, now the team’s 31-year-old general manager, was once confined to watching only nine total innings of baseball from Monday to Thursday. Kilambi, though, already had a penchant for making moves and finding edges. Sometimes he would negotiate swaps — a few innings from one week to another, if there was a marquee pitching matchup he absolutely had to see.
With his television time restricted, Kilambi found other outlets for his love of the game. His parents emigrated from India and settled in the Bay Area, so Kilambi grew up an avid San Francisco Giants fan. He began reading and then commenting on the Giants blog “McCovey Chronicles,” under the alias garbanzo24. He was a staple in the online community of Giants die-hards and part of a new generation of hyper-online baseball fans. Now, he is running a team.
Friday, the Nationals introduced Kilambi as their general manager, the de facto No. 2 under first-year Nationals president of baseball operations Paul Toboni, who is only 35 years old.
Kilambi, born in January 1994, is just one of many faces leading baseball’s freshest and most interesting leadership transition. Blake Butera, the new Nationals manager, is 33, the sport’s youngest since the Twins hired 33-year-old Frank Quilici in 1972.
“Hopefully, this isn’t about Ani being young or me being young or Blake or whoever, right?” Toboni said Friday. “It’s just like, ‘Hey, we’re trying to bring together a group that is really high-performing, that works together great and is also exceptionally aligned.’”
Intentional or not, the level of change is striking. Only a few months ago, the Nationals were viewed as one of the last bastions of baseball’s old school. Former general manager Mike Rizzo was 63, a former minor-league player who turned to coaching and then climbed the ranks as a scout. Manager Davey Martinez, 61, played 16 years in the major leagues and was a longtime bench coach before he got the Nationals job in October of 2017. Pitching coach Jim Hickey and hitting coach Darnell Coles were both 63.
Under the leadership of Rizzo and Martinez, the Nationals captured a World Series title in 2019. But by the time the pair was fired in early July amid a sputtering rebuild, the Nationals were viewed as behind the times. Their analytics systems weren’t meshed with the rest of the organization. Their player development operation lagged behind the sport’s most efficient behemoths.
Like many aspects of society, baseball front offices have long operated with pushes and pulls, overcorrections from one extreme to another. Think the Giants’ shift from the analytical Farhan Zaidi to the former catcher Buster Posey, the Tigers’ move from the old scout Al Avila to the whiz kid Scott Harris, the Red Sox’s turns from Dave Dombrowski to Chaim Bloom to Craig Breslow.
Before this job, Toboni had worked for the Red Sox since 2015 and saw what some of those transitions looked like. Zack Scott, himself once a member of a young Boston front office and now an agent for MLB coaches and executives, theorized some of the difficulties Bloom faced could factor into Toboni’s overhaul in pursuit of like-minded support. Many in Bloom’s front office, including Scott, had long been entrenched in the organization.
“He saw what Chaim went through,” Scott said. “(If) you know someone and you trust them, and you can have honest conversations with them, you know that they’re not just playing games.”
The phenomenon of the young, well-educated executive is no longer new. Theo Epstein and Jon Daniels were 28 when they first took the reins of the Red Sox and Rangers, respectively. Even Dombrowski was only 31 when he took over the Montreal Expos, way back in 1988.
But most often, these sorts of hires come with guardrails. The young manager hires an experienced bench coach. The baby-faced GM hired a cabinet of older, grizzled advisers or, in the case of Epstein and Terry Francona, has a field manager who has seen it all.
The Nationals, though, are doubling down on their ’90s-kid hive mind to a near-unprecedented level. Much of their old guard has been replaced since Rizzo’s firing. In addition to Toboni and Kilambi — who both went to Cal but did not actually meet until the general managers’ meetings a couple of years ago — assistant GM Justin Horowitz is 34 and AGM Devin Pearson is 31. Mike DeBartolo, who served as the interim GM after Rizzo’s firing and remains aboard as an assistant general manager, is a practically ancient 41.
got our guy pic.twitter.com/0Ion8rUn0x
— Washington Nationals (@Nationals) December 18, 2025
Butera, a former minor-league manager who was most recently the Rays’ director of player development, hired a remarkably young staff to support him. Pitching coach Simon Mathews is 30, a product of think-tanks at Driveline Baseball and Push Performance who not long ago had a job in the business world to help pay his rent. Mathews worked his way up the Reds’ organization and spent one year on the major-league staff before becoming the lead pitching coach for the Nationals.
Of Butera’s 11-person coaching staff, only three coaches are older than 40. Bench coach Michael Johns is the oldest at 50. His only two years of major-league coaching experience came as first-base coach with the Rays.
“Someone made a joke,” Butera said earlier this month at Winter Meetings. “Did you tell Paul when you got hired that the staff has to be under 40 years old? I’m like, ‘You might not believe me, but no.’ We wanted to make sure the biggest thing is we bring in good people.”
The Nationals, again, say this is not so much a targeted youth movement. There are of course older coaches, scouts and executives who have adapted to the game’s modern state and are well-versed in technology.
But in seeking their buzzword of choice — alignment — the Nationals have hired a plethora of people from a similar age group. The common themes are the shared language of baseball’s modern state, a fluency in data and technology, perhaps a higher floor in every conversation. In theory, there is less onboarding to do when new hires already view the sport much the way Toboni and Kilambi do.
“My excitement is not about the age of the people who are working around me, but rather the ideas and the skills and the talents that everyone brings to the table,” Kilambi said. “We want to surround ourselves with open-minded folks with great ideas about how to win baseball games, and they can come from all ages and backgrounds.”
A hiring trend as extreme as what we’re seeing with the Nationals could come with its own risks. Staffers throughout the sport talk of spirited debate and healthy disagreement driving decision-making. Echo chambers rarely win championships.
When Scott took over as the Mets’ GM in 2021, he was trying to decipher which lieutenants would give him earnest feedback.
“I’m trying to figure out who can I trust here, who’s telling me the truth, which I think is a huge thing,” Scott said. “No one tells the boss the truth. They don’t like to deliver bad news.”
“Alignment,” which Scott believes Toboni is pursuing, can make it easier.
“He’s like, ‘We’re gonna have a high standard, but we’re going to be a high support environment,” Scott said of what he’s learned of Toboni’s approach with the Nats. “I don’t want you to take the job because you just need a job.” Kilambi in particular has a reputation for open-mindedness and humility.
“He’s got a great sense of humor,” Toboni said. “He likes to laugh. He can keep things light. He fits culturally with what we’re doing. But then also, Ani has a great ability to challenge and push us forward, but also not antagonize folks in the process.”
Regardless of the construction, this new Nationals regime has not been shy about its ambitions. Toboni talked of wanting to build a “scouting and player development monster.” He wrote a 1,031-word letter to fans in which he stated he aims to make the Nationals “the envy of sport.”
The work is just beginning. Last season, Washington finished last in the National League East with a 66-96 record. The Nationals are still locked in a rebuild after losing talents such as Max Scherzer, Trea Turner, Bryce Harper, Anthony Rendon and Juan Soto in the back half of the Rizzo era. The key return pieces from the Soto trade — MacKenzie Gore, CJ Abrams, James Wood, Robert Hassell III and Jarlin Susana — plus touted draft picks Dylan Crews and Eli Willits, give the Nationals promising parts to work with.
But their holes are many, and no organization completely reshapes itself in one offseason.
What the Nationals frame as a focus on alignment also profiles as an incredible experiment.
“If we do a really good job creating the culture that we want to create, folks from other teams are going to be itching to join our organization, and folks within our organization are going to be scared to leave,” Toboni said, “because they don’t know if the feeling of being with the Nationals organization is going to be replicated somewhere else.”
With reports from The Athletic’s Dennis Lin and Evan Drellich