Reunited and it feels so good:
Bret Boone joins brother Aaron and father Bob in the Nationals organization. The team offered the second baseman an invitation to the Accelerated Development Program and a non guaranteed minor-league contract. He has appeared in 3 All Star games and has won a pair of AL Silver Slugger Awards, as well as 4 Gold Gloves throughout his career. Boone hasn’t played since 2005.

A Lefty Joins the battle for rotation spots:
After a day of rumors, the Nats agree to terms on a minor league contract with Odalis Perez at a reported 800,000.

Position players report:
A fully recovered Ryan Zimmerman, a re-energized Felipe Lopez, a healthy Nick Johnson and a lighter Dmitri Young have all been spotted starting their spring training early.

Here’s a great quote from the “face of the franchise” with no long-term contract (yet):

We are tired of losing. We are good enough to win. The way we played the last month of the season — the last two weeks against teams that were competing for a playoff spot — we played them tough. So that shows we are not scared. We were scared before, but we know we can win. We have a little quiet confidence about us. That’s how it’s going to be this year. .. Competing isn’t good enough. We want to win and we want to win now.” — Zimmerman

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Contracts, Injuries, Spring Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.