“It’s never on coaching,” Martinez said. “It’s never on coaching. Coaches work their a**** off every single day. We’re not going to finger-point here and say it’s on the coaches. They work hard.”
After saying he had played the game a long time and never blamed a coach, he continued defending the team’s coaching staff and put the blame on the players.
“Sometimes you got to put the onus on the players,” Martinez said. “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.”
There is a lot to unpack from all of that.
First, nobody was actually putting the blame on the coaches. It was a simple question from a reporter as to whether it should be on the players or the coaches. Martinez then turned it into a passionate defense of the coaching staff, while throwing the players under the bus (after saying they were not going to point fingers).
Second, Martinez isn’t entirely wrong with what he’s saying.
It does come down to the players. The coaches can’t pitch, hit or field for them. But even if that is the case, it’s not something a manager can say out loud. It’s not something a manager can say out loud when the team is 30-40 and when the team (under this current manager) has not had a winning season in six years.
It’s a matter of accountability.
And a manager who is not willing to take any responsibility and is instead more than happy to throw his players under the bus is a manager who is quickly going to lose the respect of his locker room.
If he hasn’t already.
It’s not just that he put the onus on the players to play better. That alone could be acceptable. It’s the big leagues and everybody is highly compensated and open to criticism, especially when they are not performing. It’s that he put the onus on the players and absolutely refused to put any on his coaching staff or himself, and instead backed them up completely.
The Nationals’ roster is not particularly good right now, and there probably is not a manager who is going to turn that group of players into a winner. That also has to fall on the general manager and front office for assembling such a flawed and bad roster.
When you are a team as bad as the Nationals, nobody gets to escape blame for it. That’s not the view of Martinez, where everybody else gets the blame except for him and his coaching staff, just because they work hard.