The Post Sports Live crew makes a case for Nationals manager Matt Williams to win manager of the year for the National League after leading the team back to the playoffs. (Post Sports Live/The Washington Post)

The Post Sports Live crew makes a case for Nationals manager Matt Williams to win manager of the year for the National League after leading the team back to the playoffs. (Post Sports Live/The Washington Post)

Look at the talent Matt Williams inherited, the roster the Washington Nationals handed him when they made him their manager — made him a manager for the first time — last fall. They had won 184 games and a division title over two years. The last manager had been gently nudged aside, not fired amid failing players. It was an easy job.

“Anybody in the game would have loved it,” Williams said. “I looked at it first and foremost as a great opportunity, with a lot of expectation and some pressure to go along with it.”

Look at the issues Williams, 48, faced, the injuries and the controversies that bubbled up over the course of the summer. The Nationals played 18 games with their projected everyday lineup. Their franchise player learned two new positions, their biggest star got benched less than a month into the season and their closer imploded in September. It was a hard job.

“There’s been more sleepless nights than I had anticipated, with some crazy things that have gone on,” Williams said. “That’s part of the fun, though. It’s part of the challenge.”

Look at Williams on Sept. 16, thrusting a bottle of Coors Light into the air, encircled by his players, toasting the National League East champions. Depending on your interpretation, Williams had guided them through a regular season that ends Sunday with his unemotional, unrelenting emphasis on detail, or he had been carried there by perhaps the deepest, most talented roster in Major League Baseball. They couldn’t have done it without him; any manager could have done it. Go ahead and pick one.

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“I think more than anything, he kind of stayed out of our way and let us play,” right fielder Jayson Werth said. “He pushed all the right buttons and pulled all the right strings. He did a good job — first-year manager. He was given a good team, though, and he didn’t screw it up.”

How’s that for an epitaph? Really, Williams’s impact on the Nationals has been more meaningful and more subtle than that. When he inherited talent, he also inherited pressure. In spring training, closer Rafael Soriano plopped onto a couch in his new manager’s office. “I think we have the talent,” Soriano told Williams. “Make sure you pull everything together.”

The best-laid plans . . .

The Nationals had veterans such as Werth, Adam LaRoche and Ryan Zimmerman. They had a rotation of five starting pitchers capable of 200-inning seasons. They had a bullpen with three 30-save closers. They had a lineup with seven players who could hit 20 homers.

“My job is to guide and, if I can, help,” Williams said. “So far this year, I haven’t had to help much, because they’ve taken ownership of it. They’ve been the guys that have stepped on the field and done it.”

Easy, right? Well, before the Nationals rallied at the end of 2013, they stood at 48-53 in late July. Under Manager Davey Johnson, they all but disregarded opposing base stealers. They ignored advances in defensive positioning based on scouting information and rarely shifted. Roles jumbled in the bullpen, one reason the team’s former closer, Drew Storen, was demoted to the minors in July .

Williams tasked bench coach Randy Knorr with controlling the opponents’ running game, allowing Knorr to call pickoffs from the dugout. Now the Nationals lead the majors, having caught 38 percent of attempted base stealers.

Williams brought a new coach with him from Arizona and created a new position for him: defensive coordinator. Mark Weidemaier aligns infielders, more often with subtle shading than extreme shifts. According to advanced metrics that attempt to quantify defense, the Nationals’ defense cost them 15 runs in 2013; this year, it has saved them six.

Williams empowered and encouraged his coaching staff, most of which he inherited. For all his managerial brilliance, Johnson never walked into a room convinced he didn’t know better than everyone else in it. Williams delegated and listened, allowing a group of hardworking, smart people to make an impact in a way Johnson’s personality prevented.

Easy? On opening day, Wilson Ramos broke his hamate bone. “Wait a minute,” Williams remembers thinking. His opening day cleanup hitter had landed on the disabled list before the bunting could be taken down. Ramos joined right-hander Doug Fister, who suffered a lat strain in spring training.

The injuries would not stop piling up. Denard Span, Zimmerman , Bryce Harper, LaRoche, Scott Hairston and Gio Gonzalez all spent time on the disabled list before the all-star break.

“You adjust,” Williams said. “You play long enough in this game and you understand, you got to adjust. There’s going to be peaks and valleys and all of that. If you just put your head down, and you just push forward, then you can accomplish what you want to accomplish.”

Finding a way

The Nationals have gone 37-18 since Aug. 1, becoming dominant once they grew healthy. They kept themselves in position for the streak to matter, in part, because of Williams’s steadiness.

“We would show spurts, and we’d lose a key guy,” General Manager Mike Rizzo said. “We’d overcome that adversity and start playing, and something else would happen. Every time, Matt found a way to plug the hole — be it with his demeanor, his calmness, a bench player stepping up and performing well to allow us to bridge that gap.”

The bumps came in other forms. In April, partly because of injuries and partly because of inexperience, Williams jostled lineups daily. In the season’s first eight games, he batted Harper fifth, second, sixth and seventh. Early in the season, a group of relievers pleaded with pitching coach Steve McCatty to stop Williams from warming them up so frequently in the bullpen.

But Williams settled on an everyday lineup — their most-used lineup includes Asdrubal Cabrera, a July 31 pickup, batting eighth. He also managed to keep the bullpen fresh, even as the Nationals gave Aaron Barrett a month-long respite in Class AAA Syracuse.

“He makes mistakes, like everyone else in baseball,” Soriano said. “To be here the first year, to be the manager, and look at the team already. I’m happy for him. I don’t think many first-time managers make the playoffs.”

Williams’s best lineup decision came when he stuck with Span. At multiple times this season, Span met with Williams to inform him he felt he should be the everyday leadoff hitter and center fielder. Williams agreed, and he stuck with Span at the top even as his slash line — baseball slang for batting average, on-base percentage and slugging average — dropped to .265/.312/.388 on the day Harper came off the disabled list.

Williams had faced questions from reporters about Span’s place atop the lineup. Harper publicly suggested Zimmerman should stay in left field, which implied Harper should take over for Span in center. Williams handled the potential controversy deftly and stayed with Span. Span has since hit .331/.393/.435, and the Nationals went from a half-game behind to division champs. “A man of his word,” Span called Williams.

In the raucous, booze-soaked clubhouse on Sept. 16 in Atlanta, Harper was asked when he knew the Nationals could win the division. He pointed, without prompting, to Williams’s influence.

“It started with day one with Matt,” Harper said. “Having everything he’s brought to the table, having all the hard work that he’s brought, he works hard every single day, and that makes us want to work hard. We have a lot of fun. He lets us have fun.”

More work to do

Now comes Williams’s next task. Only four rookie managers — Bucky Harris (with the 1924 Washington Senators), Ralph Houk, Eddie Dyer and Bob Brenly — have won the World Series. Williams played third base for Brenly’s 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks. Williams excelled in the regular season by keeping a steady hand, knowing when to press his players and when to pull back. In the playoffs, his in-game strategy will be more important, and more scrutinized, than ever.

“There’s going to be 1,000 people in and around that batting cage,” Brenly said in a phone interview. “You have to worm your way up the tunnel [to the dugout]. It’s just not the normal schedule people are used to. You have to accept that and prepare your players for it. Then it’s just baseball like you’ve played all year.

“That’s when it falls on Matty. It’s a new sense of urgency. In June, you may try to milk an extra inning out of your starter. In the playoffs, you better use your eyes and experience and knowledge to know when to act more quickly than you normally would. I’m sure Matty has paid attention. I’m sure he knows what guys he can trust and what guys he can’t.”

Williams has brought the Nationals this far, in part, because they trust him. On the first day of spring training, Williams called a meeting and asked players how they wanted to play. He allowed them to set the terms, but then he held them to them — even when it meant benching Harper in April after he failed to run out a groundball.

“It’s hard to say when you’re in the middle of it, but he was huge,” LaRoche said. “He had a great combination of knowing when to get fired up and keeping that mentality of when he was a player, and knowing when to come in and drop a joke and knowing when somebody needed a break and when to lighten the mood. He’s been huge for us. He had the respect of the guys in spring training because of what he did as a player, and I think he’s earned the respect as a manager and leader of this team. That says a lot.”

Williams was handed a team that would have been excellent with a lot of managers at the helm. But over the six-month slog of a baseball season, that team could have frayed in so many different ways. It may have been an enviable job, but that doesn’t mean it was easy. And Williams sure didn’t screw it up.