And welcome to Nats chat for Monday, March 1st, 2021, our first true episode of this podcast, along with Nats insider, Mark Zuckerman of Massensports.com. I'm Al Galdi, host of the Al Galdi podcast. Mark, it is great to be with you on this podcast. We have an actual baseball game to

discuss and overreact to Great Fruit League opener for the Nats on Sunday afternoon, a for all

tie with the St. Louis Cardinals. Just the fact that we say tie, nothing says Great Fruit League

baseball quite like that. But it is good to have live baseball back, my friend.

There's nothing better, Al, than overreacting to the first game of spring training, to the lineup, to what we saw, to all the guys who, you know, nothing against them, probably have little chance of making the team this year.

But we're going to interpret anything we want from this. We're going to get upset over the fact that they blew a lead with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. We're going to get upset over the fact that Nats got screwed over in the top of the first because Jack Flaherty hit too high of a pitch count with one out, so they pulled him off the field. They rolled over the inning. This is a new twist for this spring to

try to keep guys healthy and, you know, the Nats deserved to let that in and keep going. We're just going to go nuts over this. No, we can't do that. They want to spring training, but it was nice to see them on the field playing game and with fans in attendance. Yes, there were, or what, like 1,500 fans or so in attendance at the game?

Yeah, 1,500.

And, you know, the hope would be that over time that starts to increase, you know, we'll see. I think everybody, Major League Baseball, all the local communities, everyone is really curious to see now how this goes. Hopefully, there are no, you know, spikes in coronavirus cases that come out of any of these places.

You know, the hope would be that this can be done safely.

The fact it's outdoors helps.

Most people that I could see on TV were wearing masks.

Not everyone was.

That may be a bit of an issue that they have to work on over the course of the spring and then into the regular season.

But, you know, this is the test ground for the regular season.

And if they have visions of

really having normal sized or close to normal sized crowds by the summer and the fall, this is

where it begins now. This is the test ground for it.

All right. Before we truly get going, a few items of business we want to get into. So we have

a Twitter handle at NatS underscore chat. We've already corresponded with a lot of

you via that, but keep the feedback coming there. We have an email address, Natschat podcast at

gmail.com. So if you want to speak to us in a longer form, if you have questions for us on the

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