Construction manager

Martinez's comments reflect his frustration -- and his tenuous job security -- with the young Nationals

Associated Press photo

If you’ve spent any time around Dave Martinez, you can’t help but notice his perpetually upbeat attitude.

It came in handy when his 2019 Washington Nationals won just 19 of their first 50 games. Perhaps buoyed by their manager’s lack of panic, that talented veteran team rebounded to win the franchise’s first and only World Series title.

Martinez’s sunny disposition also has helped in the lean years since then, when what general manager Mike Rizzo initially described as a “reboot” has become a full-blown rebuilding project — one that has taken longer than expected and seems to have stalled.

Few managers survive five straight losing seasons. So perhaps it wasn’t all too surprising that Martinez’s mood turned uncharacteristically sour last week.

Asked about the causes of a slump that has now reached 10 straight losses, he minced few words — and may have given a hint that his job security may be at a low ebb.

“It’s never on coaching. Never on coaching,” Martinez told reporters Saturday in a rare moment of visible frustration. “Coaches work their asses off every single day. We’re not going to finger-point here and say it’s [on the] coaches. It’s never on the coaches. They work hard. The message is clear. All the work is done prior. Sometimes [the players] got to go out there and they got to play the game. It’s always been about the players. Always. I played this game a long time. Never once have I blamed a coach for anything. [As players], we worked our asses off to get better. They gave us information, and we used it. These guys understand what the game is.”

“ ... Sometimes you got to put the onus on the players. They got to go out there, and they got to play the game — and play the game the right way. We can’t hit for them. We can’t catch the balls for them. We can’t pitch for them. We can’t throw strikes for them. They got to do that.”

They haven’t done any of that very well lately, and Martinez may end up paying the price. Washington’s last five losses have come to a pair of last-place teams: three to the Miami Marlins and two to the feckless Colorado Rockies (16-57), who already have fired their manager (Bud Black) and are threatening to break the record for fewest wins in a 162-game season set last year by the Chicago White Sox (41).

Tuesday night’s 10-6 loss to Colorado featured seven home runs by the Rockies and chants of “Fire Davey” from what had been a previously patient fan base. It’s a results-oriented business, but Martinez’s previous comments didn’t help his situation.

Clearly, this mess isn’t entirely Martinez’s fault. Thanks largely to the haul Rizzo received in the 2022 Juan Soto trade, the Nationals have plenty of young talent. They also own the No. 1 pick in next month’s draft.

But the Lerner family has suddenly become frugal, declining to spend enough to surround their top prospects with veterans who can teach them to win, as Jayson Werth and Adam LaRoche did a decade ago.

That leaves Martinez with a group of 20-somethings that are learning painful lessons, swinging at pitches outside the strike zone, making excessive errors in the field and on the base paths. Often, the advice from the coaching staff seems to fall on deaf ears, as players rarely learn from their mistakes.

That’s probably why Martinez felt the need to vent on Saturday. But while veteran players are more likely to respond to being called out, publicly chastising young athletes rarely works out well for anyone.

When Ralph Friedgen coached Maryland’s football team two decades ago, the Terps enjoyed their greatest success in the past 35 years, winning an Atlantic Coast Conference title and going to several bowl games.

There were a few clunkers mixed in with the wins, though. And when those happened, Friedgen — publicly, at least — never threw his players under the bus.

Nearly every one of his postgame press conferences after a loss opened with some form of the following statement: “I’ve got to do a better job putting our guys in position to win.”

Undoubtedly, the next day’s team film review contained some far more scathing words, delivered with no cameras or microphones to record them. But for public consumption, Friedgen’s message to his players was always: I’ve got your back. You need to have mine.

Martinez’s outburst likely was meant to motivate his young players and prevent a season that was supposed to finally deliver tangible improvement from going south before the All-Star break. (Preserving his job figured in there somewhere, too.)

His words, though, may well have the opposite effect. They may erode his players’ fragile confidence even more and make them (and perhaps ownership) feel he’s not loyal to them.

Or they may have been an honest assessment of a team whose future isn’t as bright as we believed it to be. As the old saying goes, you can’t fire the players. So guess whose head will be first on the chopping block.