ESPN980's The Sports Fix's Kevin Sheehan and Thom Loverro sat down in Morton's Steakhouse to have "Lunch With A Legend" this afternoon, talking to Nats' team President Stan Kasten about his career in sports and his time with the Washington Nationals. Here's some of what Mr. Kasten had to say:
• Stan Kasten On The Nats' "Real Rotation":
"...there's a group of thirteen names, let's call it eight, ten, twelve names, from which we're going to have five that I think will form a real major league rotation. We have the guys up here who are pitching now, some nights they are having good nights, others they're not. The young ones do take longer to really mature and become successful contributors. In addition to that we're getting Jordan Zimmermann back, we're getting Ross Detwiler back, John Lannan will be coming back, Jason Marquis is coming back, Scott Olsen is coming back, Chien-Ming Wang is coming back. We're going to have a big time rotation out of that group of people and we think we're going to have it as soon as the next couple of weeks."
• Stan Kasten on Jordan Zimmermann and Yunesky Maya + The Maya video everyone's been posting after the JUMP...
• Stan Kasten: Jordan Zimmermann the Nats' no.2 starter when he gets back?
"You know right now everyone has pegged Jordan as a no.2, we think he has no.2 stuff, we think he has no.2 mental makeup, and that would be great, we think that would be pretty good if he wound up being the no.2. But I'll say this, if someone jumps ahead of him and is even better than him, that would be even better for us."
• Stan Kasten: The Washington Post is reporting that the Nats are on the verge of signing RHP Yunesky Maya?
"I saw that report, yeah...We know the player, of course, and obviously this is a player that teams in baseball have been trying to sign since the defection, which was in September '09, he was cleared and really after Aroldis Chapman...when Chapman was gone, we turned our attention to whoever was next on our list and I will tell you Maya was very high on our list at that time, and like a lot of other teams who have been waiting for paperwork to clear and all that, we've been involved in talks, and when it's all final, if we wind up with him we'll certainly be happy to talk about it, but there's nothing we can talk about today."