Saturday Morning Briefing: December 5, 2020

Good Saturday Morning, Washington Nationals Fans

Thank you for starting your day and weekend with us. Today's top story is Joe Ross regrets not playing in 2020.

Do you like podcasts? Subscribe to the Nats Report Morning Brief podcast. Start your day off right. Get today's top story about the Washington Nationals and Major League Baseball in four minutes or less. The Morning Brief is a perfect companion to this newsletter.

The podcast can be found on all the major podcasting platforms. Click here to subscribe on Apple iTunes.

Yesterday, Josh Harrison and Joe Ross participated in a half an hour Zoom conference call with reporters to discuss their involvement with the Players Alliance. Some interesting tidbits came out of the more than half an hour conference call. One of those interesting moments was that Joe Ross mentioned that he wished that he played during the 2020 shortened COVID season.

However, even though there remains a lot of uncertainty around what the 2021 season is going to look like in terms of schedule and health protocols that might be implemented, Ross is looking forward to playing in 2021 and is comfortable returning to play: "I'm pretty confident going into this year that everyone will have a pre-solidified plan on how to do so," he said. "I know they made some adjustments last year in the middle of the season, once they did start back up. I'm confident going into spring training. Hopefully, everything will be going better. I know they're saying winter's going to be a hard time. I'm looking forward to getting this spring started. [See some of the other quotes from the interview here.]

It was a busy week in Major League Baseball, with the non-the first day tender/tender deadline for arbitration-eligible players occurring on Wednesday. As expected, the Washington Nationals have tendered contracts to all unsigned players on the 40-man roster, including outfielder Juan Soto and shortstop Trea Turner. Now comes the challenging task of negotiating long term contracts with both of these players.

There was a record of players who were tendered, 59 in total. Ken Rosenthal from the Athletic wrote an interesting piece about how baseball must address its economic system. It is worth a read. [Click here to read. Subscription required]

Lastly, our friends at Talk Nats.com wrote an excellent article that is worth your time where they rank all of the non-tenders from around the league and then make suggestions on who the Nationals should look to sign. It is worth your time. [Read here]

Share this article
The link has been copied!