And welcome to Nats chat for Thursday, March 4th, 2021. Inside of a month are we of opening day for the Nationals?

April 1st against the New York Mets at Nationals Park, where there may well be no fans.

We'll get into that in just a bit, but we have lots of Nats news to get into, including a conversation with Mr. National, Ryan Zimmerman, along with Nats Insider, Mark Zircerman of Massensports.com. I'm Al Galdi, host of the Al-Galdi podcast. And, you know, we taped the Zimmerman interview during that taping. Mark actually tried to pick a fight with Zim over analytics, which I thought was really unbecoming of you, Mark.

But anyway, how are you? I'm doing fine, Alan. As you'll hear in the interview, this is one of those, you know, unfortunately, you can't see our faces as you're listening to this. We are all doing this where we can see our faces. And as soon as you asked Zim a question about analytics, I just started smiling because I've heard him field that

question before and I know his thoughts on it on and off the record. And so I kind of got a little kick out of that. You guys will enjoy it at the end of the show. Yeah, I got to hear the Zimmerman take, the Zimmerman opus on Sabermetrics. So it was a lot of fun, though. Zimmerman was outstanding. We did a lot of like looking back with Zimmerman too.

I think people by now are up to date with all the basebally stuff for 2021 with Zim. But, you know, some good stuff on how close he came to actually wanting to leave the Nats during the bad days of the Nationals franchise, how he's doing in terms of now being a full-time first baseman, which he has been actually for longer than people may think, and all kinds of things with Zim.

You know, having won a World Series, how close he came to maybe calling it a career was sitting

out the 2020 season.

So lots of good stuff with Zimmerman.

You'll get to that.

You'll hear that in just a bit.

Some items of business here on the Nats chat podcast.

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email the mastermind of all of this. He is the Billy Bean of the Nats chat podcast. Tim Schovers,

the email address, Nats chat podcast at gmail.com. We're off to a very good start when it comes to

you guys subscribing and spreading the word about the podcast. We want to thank you very much for

that. And Mark, and I'm not sure what this means, but we want to thank Chesapeake,

Virginia, which is responsible for the second most downloads of this podcast so forth. Chesapeake,

Virginia. Okay. Do any of us have family down there? What's going on there? Not that I'm aware of.

Apparently, it's a Nats town. That's great. I love to hear that. I think I will say, I mean, we joke about this, but I will say from having covered this team long enough and having interacted with enough fans, that there really are Nationals fans literally around the world. I've heard from so many of them from so many different

places. They have some connection to D.C., either from the past or more recently, and especially

nowadays, it's so much easier to follow a team from anywhere. And this is a great way for it to do it as well

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