Nats Take a Catcher Off the Board, Pirates Get a Manager, Carriage Deal, and Other Cubs Gobble Bullets

It shouldn’t take a holiday to say it, but if the holiday reminds you, then you may as well say it: thank you to all of you for your support, your words, your eyeballs, and your time over the years. I especially think about it when I’m writing these Bullets intros, and I feel like I’m just firing off some random thoughts to my friends. I hope you all have a great day with whatever you do, and much love to your friends and families.

Also: I’m very thankful today for the great work and support from Michael, Luis, Eli, and Bryan. Awesome, dependable, kind, and good people.

As you might expect, coverage today will be light. There’ll be some Bears stuff for the game, but beyond these Bullets, baseball coverage will be limited to significant deals/rumors/news. Take care!

  • Speaking of moves, the Nationals closed up the very busy day yesterday around baseball with a signing. A re-signing, actually, as they’ll bring back catcher Yan Gomes on a two-year, $10 million deal, per Jeff Passan. Gomes, 32, was pretty bad at the plate this past year (.223/.316/.389, 79 wRC+), though that’s not terrible for a solid defensive catcher, which he is. So the deal sounds about right, and takes yet another catching option off the market (and makes Willson Contreras look all the more attractive, because the Nationals weren’t going to be going after him – so the market didn’t lose a suitor, just a catcher).
  • Obviously, the flip side to all of this tracking of the Cubs listening on Contreras is that he remains extremely valuable, relative to the rest of the catching market, and the Cubs have him for three more years. Would it really be a bad outcome for him to stick around to be paired with Victor Caratini, making one of the best catching tandems in the game? Of course not! If there’s not a great, obvious deal out there for Contreras that makes sense in BOTH the near and long-term, then whatever. I don’t think anyone affirmatively wants the Cubs to just get rid of Contreras – instead, it’s just that *if* the Cubs want to re-shape the lineup while also building for the future, moving Contreras is among the more understandable ways to approach it.
  • The Pirates finally have a new manager, and it’s a hot name hire from the Twins (proving that organization disarray does not stop guys from taking their shot at one of the 30 managerial seats in the league – you gotta take your chance when you get it):
  • Thanks to tps for passing this on – i3 Broadband is a relatively small provider, but they cover Peoria and Champaign in Illinois, so it’ll be nice for folks in those areas to have a little more coverage:
  • Random former Cub:
  • For those of you who want traveling podcasts, we just dropped two new episodes of ‘Onto Waveland’ over at The Athletic.
  • If you haven’t seen yet, make sure you check out this Thanksgiving special, because I have it on good authority that this is the biggest sale of the year for player name shirts:
  • It’s probably not, but I like to think that the “everything-but-the-turkey” guy is Schwarber:
  • written by

    Brett Taylor is the Lead Cubs Writer at Bleacher Nation, and you can find him on Twitter at @BleacherNation and on LinkedIn here. Brett is also the founder of Bleacher Nation, which opened up shop in 2008 as an independent blog about the Chicago Cubs. Later growing to incorporate coverage of other Chicago sports, Bleacher Nation is now one of the largest regional sports blogs on the web.

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