Now, even with the rarely seen Derek Lilliquist out, the fan base is still milling around a single figure, pitchforks in hand: Manager Dave Martinez. He is, in his season-and-change in charge of a team with self-described World Series aspirations, three games under .500 entering Saturday.

We can all make our own judgments about the manager and his moves. There’s plenty to mine there, but pause it for a second. What matters, as it pertains to Dave Martinez’s tenure, is how Dave Martinez’s bosses judge him.

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“I judge him by the decisions he makes, and how handles the clubhouse,” General Manager Mike Rizzo said Thursday before a (barely) face-saving 2-1 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals. “I can’t find a lot of examples of malpractice by the manager.”

There’s plenty to quibble with there. But as this team navigates a stretch that could determine whether this season is salvaged or torched — a murderous 10-game road trip through Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Los Angeles — it’s important to know: The man who hired the beleaguered manager not only has his beleaguered back but is pointing the finger squarely at himself.

“The performance goes to the players, and the players are on the roster because I put them there,” Rizzo said. “Every important decision that’s made for the Washington Nationals, I’m responsible for. I can live with that. That’s the way things have to be. With all this venom about, ‘He can’t handle the bullpen’ — some bullpens are harder to handle than others. When a bullpen’s struggling, it’s difficult to find the right move to make.”

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This is Rizzo as Papa Bear, protecting his den as the cubs are cowering. In the room at Nationals Park in which Martinez meets with reporters before and after every home game, there’s a placard that hangs to the manager’s left. In the center is the “W” logo, surrounded by three words: “excellence,” “performance” and “accountability.”

The first two have been locked in a closet here over the first 30-plus games. So someone had to address that final matter: Whose fault is this anyway? Put it at Martinez’s feet? Rizzo won’t.

“To me, you judge the manager by how he handles the game,” Rizzo said. “If it’s a personnel decision, that’s me. I’m the one who put the roster together. That’s my bullpen. This isn’t a resource issue. This isn’t a decision-making issue. What we had at the beginning of this year out of spring training until recently — a couple weeks ago, when I think they’ve finally gotten their rhythm and their sea legs and they’re finally ready to take on the rigors of pitching out of the bullpen every day — is a performance issue. The performance goes to the players, and the players are on the roster because I put them there.”

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Maybe, for your taste, that puts too much of the blame on the players and not enough on the people who run things. Here’s who it doesn’t put blame on: the manager. That has to be by design. Rizzo hired Martinez. He defended him during an uneven, injury-riddled 2018 campaign that ended at 82-80. So he’s defending him during an uneven, injury-riddled 2019 campaign that started 13-18.

“I think [the players have] been put in position to succeed as far as the matchups and the analytics and that type of thing,” Rizzo said. “If you make the perfect move and it doesn’t work out, it’s on the manager? To me, it’s on the performance.”

The decision to fire Lilliquist was substantive, not window-dressing. In some corners of the Nationals’ operation, it was surprising he was brought back for 2019 at all. He was, in the eyes of two insiders, not a particularly hard worker — which, in good times, could be seen as simply being a player’s coach, but as the staff’s stats regressed, seemed lazy.

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The Nationals have made midseason staff switches before — two at manager, replacing Manny Acta with Jim Riggleman in 2008 and Riggleman with Davey Johnson in 2011 after Riggleman abruptly resigned because of a contract dispute, but also Randy St. Claire for Steve McCatty as pitching coach in 2009 and Rick Eckstein for Rick Schu as hitting coach in 2013.

Some of that was rearranging deck chairs. This isn’t. The only previous in-season move that really affected a playoff-ready team was Schu for Eckstein, when the Nats were defending division champs for the first time. That ’13 team never got going. Will this one?

It appears, at least for the foreseeable future, that will be determined by Martinez. Rizzo can’t find, as he said, those examples of malpractice by the manager. The counter, of course, is: How many examples of best practices can you find? Or, put another way: How many games, over the past season-and-a-month, has the manager won for his team?

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We have time, now, to keep track of that. Rizzo made it clear: The manager is not on the clock. The road trip against three playoff contenders can’t spit back a team further broken than the one that left. With three-quarters of the starting infield on the injured list, with kid slugger Juan Soto joining those players on the injured list Saturday with old-man back spasms, with a change on the coaching staff that deposed a lifelong baseball man Martinez considered a friend, the problems are mounting, not dissipating. And now come the Phillies, Brewers and Dodgers.

How, in Martinez’s view, does a manager manage that?

“For me, it’s about staying positive with the guys,” Martinez said, a line the fan base could have sung along with him before it came out of his mouth. So much positivity, when, two days in a row, he had to hit Howie Kendrick third, Matt Adams fourth and Yan Gomes fifth. There’s no Trea Turner right now, no Anthony Rendon right now, not many wins right now. And the approach is . . .

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“Just reassuring that everything’s going to be okay,” Martinez said.

He means it. He really does. But everything is not okay. If it was, they would have kept the pitching coach.

“We’ve done a lot of good things here,” Rizzo said. “We’ve put together a lot of rosters. If someone’s to blame for a guy getting hit on the finger [Turner] and a guy getting hit on the elbow [Rendon], you can assess it however you want.”

Assess it thusly: The Washington Nationals advertised themselves as a playoff contender when the season began. Right now, they’re contending for the sport’s biggest disappointment. The fan base is firing arrows in the manager’s direction. For now, the general manager is stepping in front of them.