Busy Few Days Coming Up

The next few days are going to be Nationals’ filled baseball fun pack for me. Tonight, I am going to be one of the suckers at the stadium that don’t get to see Strasburg. But I will be seeing Livan. Tomorrow is the first Blogger Day of 2010 at Nats’ Park, and I was kindly invited again. I am supposed to get to go on the field during batting practice, see the new Diamond Club area, get a tour… lots of cool stuff. I’ll be taking pictures, and putting them up here soon. How much I write on Saturday is up in the air, I’m just bringing my iPad for posting. Monday is the draft, in case you forgot with all the Strasburg hubbub. Here’s yet another Bryce Harper article to get you fired up. Finally, on Tuesday, I was able to score tickets for Strasmukah, so I’ll be there as well. It’s all weather permitting of course, but expect a flurry of activity. Mostly it’ll be on the Twitter site, but there will be stuff here as well!

After 2 Bad Days, the D is Still Better

On Wednesday,  I wrote an article about how, despite the number of errors, the team was still playing better defense than most people realized. In the next 18 innings, 2 guys committed 6 errors, and they lost both games. Seems like I have pretty good timing on this one.

I used a few metrics easily available on Baseball Reference – number of errors, number of strikeouts (for the pitching), defensive efficiency, Rtot and Rdrs. These are about all of the defensive metrics available (fielding percentage is there, but it’s really a derivative of the errors statistic. It’s probably better to use than errors, but errors are more familiar). To review, Rtot is “Total Zone Total Fielding Runs Above Average”, and Rdrs is “Defensive Runs Saved Above Average” from Baseball Info Solutions. So as of Wednesday afternoon, the Nats were looking good. Let’s see where they sit now, and for good measure, let’s throw in 2009: