Even though Nationals third baseman Ryan Zimmerman is not scheduled to hit free agency until after the 2013 season, Mark Zuckerman of CSNWashington believes the team should learn from what happened with the Cardinals and Albert Pujols and start working on a deal now.

Zuckerman says that there’s a lesson in all this. And the lesson is that “no matter how much we want to believe iconic players will forever be attached to one franchise, this remains a business first.”

Pujols left his longtime Cardinals for a 10-year, $254 million deal in Anaheim, even though the Cardinals offer was close to the Angels’. According to Zuckerman, Zimmerman’s interest in staying in Washington is real, as well as the Nationals interest in keeping him and that should motivate the sides to start working on an extension before things get messy.

This does not necessarily means both sides will reach an agreement during next season or during the next winter, but the sooner they start to work things out the less chance they have for everything to fall apart and Zimmerman ends up elsewhere.

Zimmerman, who missed more than two months due to an abdominal injury, hit .289/.355/.443 with 12 HR’s and 49 RBI’s in 395 AB’s for the Nationals in 2011.

Image by Keith Allison under the Creative Commons License.