And welcome to Nats chat for Wednesday, March 24th, 2021, along with Nats insider, Mark Suckerman of Massinsports.com. I'm Al Galdi, host of the Al Galdi podcast. We are getting closer. Eight days away are we from opening day, April 1st. Yes, opening day is on April Fool's Day. Fools, we are not. At least we don't think so.

What do you think would happen to Mark? If someone tried to play an April Fool's joke on Max Scher

on opening day, knowing as we know, his intensity on a game day, how do you think our guy Max might

react to an April Fool's joke in eight days? Oh my. I mean, there are guys who I think would handle it

quite well, and then there's Max Scherzer. And I would not be the one, want to be the one to try

that prank. I could see him trying to prank someone else and getting a kick out of it. But I would

say the last two guys in the world, I would want to try to prank on April Fool's Day if they're pitching would be Max Scherzer and Steven Strasberg. Those are the last two guys. Maybe Jonathan Papelban. I wouldn't want to mess around with that either, but I don't think we have to worry about that right now. No, not anymore. You know, it's interesting you bring up Max and Strauss because they had that incident in the dugout a few years ago, but that wasn't over an April Fool's joke, right? No, not that I'd know of, no, that was a little disagreement that honestly probably happens more than we realized, but it happened in the open. And so for all of us to finally got a chance to see it, It made some headlines at the time, but I think they're

all right. As a starting pitcher, one of the hardest things to do is when you do not feel that you did your job coming out of the game and giving five to your teammates who want you to be a good team player. It's not easy, but you got to do it. Steven Strasbourg coming out of the game, not wanting to get anybody attention.

So Max Scherzer with social leadership

and get on him a little bit here

and talking about us. coming out of the game, not wanting to get anybody attention. So Max Scherzer, with social leadership,

and get on him a little bit here and talking about certain things. Now, I really like how

Strasbourg get up, got up, and didn't want to do this in front of everybody, went back in the tunnel.

Those are two type A personalities, I guess. Strasper, not type A, but, you know, alpha dogs, guys who are very much into what they do and there aren't very many people in this world who they want telling them what to do. They may be spilled over a little bit there, but now everything's been fine since with those guys. Yeah. Well, baseball history is filled with great players who don't get along, right? Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrick famously

didn't get along. The A's of the 70s. They all hated each other. So ain't nothing wrong with a little friction every now and again. You can tweet the show at Nats underscore chat. You can email us Natschat podcast at gmail.com. If you want to join the movement as we inch ever so close to opening day, You want to join the Nats chat podcast, be an advertiser, be a supporter, email the mastermind of all this Tim Schober's. Again, Natschat podcast at gmail.com. So it was supposed to be a rather quiet Tuesday in Nats Nation. And it ended up being anything but. And the biggest item has to do with the situation at third base.

Very interestingly, for what ended up being a five-all exhibition tie with the St. Louis Cardinals,

it was Starling Castro, not Carter Keyboom, as the Nat starting third basement.

Now, I think for a lot of teams, you give your third baseman to be

an off day in the Great Fruit League season. Nobody thinks twice about it. In this situation,

though, given how bad Keeboom has been this spring training season, given the struggles that

Key Boom had last season, and given that third base is considered anything but a certainty for

the Nats going into this year, this is not insignificant, so much so that Davy, it almost felt like, was getting kind of defensive during his pregame Zoom press conference saying, quote, this doesn't mean anything. We just want to see what this looks like right now. We haven't made any decisions ahead of what we want to do, but we need to do it. And we've got a week.

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