The 4 N’s: Nats News -n- Notes

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Stephen G. "Ghost" Mears

This was the big news of the day about new positions for Randy Knorr, Matt LeCroy and Bobby Henley as well as Brian Daubach.  On the surface this looks very promising.

The other big news is that Bryce Harper won the Player of the Year award from Baseball America. (h/t to Section222)  http://www.baseballamerica.com/majors/2015-major-league-player-year-bryce-harper-2/

Not sure if this was a celebratory haircut by Bryce Harper in advance of possibly winning the Silver Slugger award where Bryce went “Silver Fox” on us:

https://instagram.com/p/8q5TorsdHb/

 

There were no HRs by any Free Seat participants at the weekend 1 swing contest!

All quiet in DC on the Nats managerial search as it continues, and Cal Ripken is the most searched name on Google for the Nats job.  Still doubt that happens, but the media and fanbase are certainly intrigued with it.

We are still hearing that Bud Black is a frontrunner in the search, and Rizzo doesn’t seem to be in a rush.

Rizzo did say this about his candidates, “As we go through our laundry list of things that we look for in our [new] manager, the perfect leader of the ballclub on the field with leadership qualities and knowledge of x’s and o’s are all important. Communication in the clubhouse and communication within the coaching staff is vital. Experience is always helpful.  It always adds a layer of expertise to anybody’s résumé.”

Does it seem that sentence we highlighted was directed at Matt Williams?  Our source had told us that last week that Rizzo wanted a good communicator which as we know MW was not a prolific communicator to the media and fanbase, and also was exposed by Svrluga to have communication issues with players.  See our post from last week about the résumé:  http://www.talknats.com/2015/10/08/rizzo-is-accepting-resumes-for-job-openings-manager-cashier-groundskeeper/

We will be working on an off-season calendar of special dates that will start at the ending of the World Series and include the dates for negotiating with Nats eligible Free Agents to exclusively negotiate with them and then the Qualified Offers that will be extended to certain players. The dates for QO’s should be the 1st week of November and players will have until the following week to accept or decline them.  This will be the 4th offseason of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), none of the 34 qualifying offers have been accepted.  At $15.8 million, this could be the year we see a player accept a QO from their current team.

Talking about news where there is just crickets chirping, the MASN resolution appears to also be headed to after the World Series. This needs to be resolved quickly and in-time for the Nats Free Agency shopping.

The ALDS and NLDS notched up the excitement level but since that’s not Nats news we will leave it at that.

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