WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — The small box sitting atop a tripod inside the batting cages at the Nationals’ spring training facility could be the first hint that something new is going on there. It’s a HitTrax machine, recording all sorts of data the moment the ball leaps off a player’s bat — launch angle, exit velocity, you name it.

If it’s measurable, Washington now has it.

This isn’t novel around Major League Baseball. In fact, the additions seen around Washington’s spring training complex are commonplace at other teams’ facilities, but they do showcase the presence of a new front office and coaching staff led by president of baseball operations Paul Toboni.

Even though the Nationals made improvements to their analytical approach in the last few years under general manager Mike Rizzo, there was ground to make up. When Toboni was hired at age 35 in November, he vowed to modernize the approach.

But as he sat on the bleachers watching several non-roster invitees compete in a live batting practice session on a back field, Toboni wanted to make one thing clear. For all the technology, for all the data being collected, the human element of baseball can’t be ignored. And as Washington aims to excel in their player development practices, the organization must meld the two.

“Whether it’s hitting, pitching, some other area of development, what we want to dominate is basically two areas with our coaches,” Toboni said. “One, they know their you-know-what, so when players go to them and need to get better, these folks know how to get them better. And secondly, they have to be able to deliver the message in a manner that gets players to really buy into what they’re saying, because that’s really important. We call it the art of coaching.”

As Toboni described his vision for what this organization will look like under his purview, he continually used that word: dominate. At the start of what realistically is the second attempt of a rebuild, wins may not be an immediate result. Those will come, Toboni believes, if the rest of the foundation takes shape.

Toboni, who worked for the Boston Red Sox most of his professional life, describes a strong foundation as “dominating” the three core tenets of any strong organization:

1. The development process

2. The acquisition process

3. Research and development tactics

Those involve the sort of data-centric knowledge base that is brimming within the coaching staff. There’s a reason why the Nationals filled out their organization with coaches who previously worked at Driveline, Tread and other advanced training centers. Many of the players already work out through the winter at these facilities; why not utilize that influence internally?

Toboni’s hand-selected manager, Blake Butera, is 33. He came up in the modern era of the game and understands the balance of interpersonal skills and analytical thinking.

The coaching staff must balance two responsibilities: competing at the highest level and occasionally ignoring the on-field results if an experiment serves a greater developmental purpose. When asked about that balance, Butera said the hours before first pitch are for development. But no one, perhaps especially a rebuilding squad, can accept anything but full effort once first pitch arrives.

“There’s a lot of new things around here, but it’s exciting to learn it and see how it’s going to help us develop into better pitchers, better everything, and win a lot of ball games in the future,” left-hander Mitchell Parker said.

Right-hander Josiah Gray said data points have been used throughout his time in the organization, but he’s looking forward to working with pitching coach Simon Mathews and assistant pitching coach Sean Doolittle in a game-planning sense. Not only will they elevate certain strengths — such as Gray’s breaking ball — they can pair that with a hitter’s weaknesses.

But Mathews, a 30-year-old who joined the organization from the Cincinnati Reds, knows when and where to deploy data.

Right-hander Cade Cavalli is working on adding a sweeper to his repertoire, and in a live batting practice session over the weekend, Cavalli spun several of them to teammates. The advanced cameras on that back field picked up the raw metrics of those pitches, but Mathews was more interested in something not quantifiable.

“I want to tether him to his performance in that moment,” Mathews said. “We can pull up a spreadsheet later and talk through the math of it later, but in the moment, I want him to remember what his hand felt like. That’s the thing that’s going to carry over. That’s the thing he’s going to remember in his bullpen and his next outing and that he’s going to be able to feel in July.”

“They’re extremely dialed-in,” said Cavalli, who’s beginning to see the reasoning behind the pitching coach’s push to add a sweeper to his arsenal. It’s backed by the data, but he’s feeling it snap out of his hand now in a satisfying manner.

Not everything that’s new is advanced technology, though. For instance, in the same batting cages that have HitTrax machines and Trajekt Arc pitching machines that can simulate every major league pitcher’s arsenal, is a medicine ball sitting on a bucket behind home plate. For Orioles fans, it’s a familiar sight.

The Nationals hired Matt Borgschulte to become their hitting coach. When Borgschulte managed the hitters in Baltimore, the medicine ball was a simple tactic that helped remind players to attack pitches in their “go zone” — generally the heart of the plate, where hitters are most likely to cause damage when swinging.

Borgschulte carried over the tactic to Washington.

“Hard-swing percentage is big here,” outfielder Andrew Pinckney said. “If you hear that baseball hit the med ball, you did something wrong. We’re attacking that med ball [zone] and everything else we’re taking, because it’s fringe anyway and you can’t really do much damage with it. So, attacking that med ball in the heart and hitting the ball hard.”

Through all of this, Toboni doesn’t want the Nationals’ focus moving too far from winning. Winning consistently may take years — and that may come only after several other organizational focuses are cemented.

But when Toboni addressed his young roster on Sunday, he implored them to remember that baseball fundamentals are narrow separators of wins and losses.

“We’re also not going to be some forward-thinking organization that doesn’t care about doing the small things that contribute to winning,” Toboni said. “I was just talking with Daylen [Lile] earlier today, like, if Cade’s on the mound and there’s a ball in the gap, we’re busting our ass into the gap to cut that ball off and coming up throwing to keep that guy at first base. It’s tough to show up in the box score, but that’s the type of play, it’s a small play, but it matters. It contributes to winning.”

So as Washington builds out the rest of its organizational approach, those big-picture items can’t obscure the focus on throwing to the right base or hustling down the line. This is a new start for the Nationals, even though the players who make up the promising young core are holdovers from the previous regime.

To Toboni, the Nationals must start the right way.

“Smaller elements of the game, they stack up over the course of 162 games, and we want to dominate those things,” Toboni said. “If we dominate those things, we do a really good job of it, then we can be at peace with ourselves and look up at the end of the year and however many wins we have is how many wins we have. And hopefully we’re in a spot [where] we can make a playoff run and we’re competing for the division, wild card, and eventually the championship.”