Nationals Arm Race

Happy 1000th post!

With this post, if I trust my WordPress engine to tell me the right number of published articles, we have hit 1000 posts in the history of this blog.

Here’s some useless information for you about the first 1000 posts:

Posts by year:

• 2010: (starting in June): 2+11+30+8+6+13+12 = 82 for the year
• 2011: 2+20+25+23+23+20+17+13+26+18+21+19 = 227 for the year
• 2012: 13+7+10+8+5+7+4+5+15+21+20+17 = 132 for the year
• 2013: 21+15+22+22+20+26+18+20+13+31+10+19 = 237 for the year
• 2014: 10+10+9+14+13+14+12+4+8+16+12+8 = 130 for the year
• 2015: 8+5+9+13+11+12+8+7+4+15+13+10=115 for the year
• 2016: 8+8+8+9+6+11+7+4+9+7=77 for 2016, including this post.  We may hit 100 in the next 3 months with all the off-season stuff we generally do.

I really got into the blog in 2011, and the post count was way up for rotation reviews of both major and minor leagues.  A new job curtailed my time immensely in mid 2012, though by the end of the season I had geared back up.  I was pretty regular with a post about 2 of every 3 days in 2013, with a whole slew of short posts in October 2013 to preview pitching match-ups for playoff games.  2014 scaled off a bit… a trend continuing into 2015 and 2016.

Milestone Posts

• 1st post: 6/22/10 “Mission Statement and Introduction.”
• 100th post: 2/22/11, “Whose Rotation Job is really at stake?“
• 200th post: 7/9/11, “Nats Rotation Cycle #18: good/bad/soso“
• 300th post: 12/21/11, “Nats Off-season News Items Wrap-up 12/21/11 edition“
• 400th Post: 10/22/12, “My 2012 End-of-Season award Predictions“
• 500th Post: 4/1/13, “Happy 2013 season! Nats Win!” (first game of the 2013 season)
• 600th Post: 8/20/13: “What will Shark Fans do now?“
• 700th Post: 3/6/14, “National High School Powers“
• 800th Post: 11/27/14: “Happy Thanksgiving 2014“
• 900th Post: 10/30/15: “2015 Season Statistical Review of the 2012 draft class“
• 1000th Post: this one on 10/14/16.  The 999th post was of course the 2016 NLDS Game 5 post-mortem done earlier today.

Random Blog milestones

• 17th post: 8/9/10 “2011 Rotation Competition” First post where I started the formatting theme of bolding a proper name the first time it appears in a post.  I started this to highlight those players who I was specifically talking about.
• 55th post: 10/20/10: “Contract Value for FA Starting Pitchers: The Cliff Lee Lesson to-be” First post where I started incorporating pictures into the blog posts.  I got the idea from Mark Zuckerman‘s blog, where he always uses a single picture at the top of each blog post.  Initially I used images.google.com to find the images and then attempt to give proper photo credit.  Coincidentally, at some point in the past I did a ton of research on the use of photos on the internet and had a discussion on the subject (in the comments section of this May 2011 post).  Now I generally use pictures from wiki and/or flickr where the author has granted free use.
• 221st post:  8/25/11, “My Answers to Boswell’s Chat Questions 8/22/11 edition.”  This was the earliest post that I regularly started using “tags” for player names.  I started doing this after turning on the “tag cloud” along the right hand side.  The tags also serve as a nice searching method for a particular player.  (I’ve since gone through some effort to “tag” the posts prior to this one but am not entirely caught up to the history of the blog).
• 243rd post: 9/25/11, “New Theme!”  I changed the look and feel of the blog from an out-of-the-box WordPress theme to a custom theme.  I was doing this primarily to figure out a way to get the blog slogan (the Earl Weaver quote at the top) to be more visible.
• 1/12/12: Posted a missive about “What are non-MLB associated baseball league talent equivalents?” which suddenly got picked up by a major media outlet and I started getting hits from all over the place.  I still go back and update this post to this day.
• 6/13/12: My first post covering the College World Series: College World Series Preview/Regionals Recap.  I now cover the College season at least starting with the field of 64 and sometimes (time allowing) with previews of local college teams.
• 3/28/13: My first post covering local prep players: Local HS players to keep an eye on this Spring.  I now try to cover any halfway decent player anywhere in DC, MD or VA in its entirety.
• 5/23/13: My first post covering the local High school tournaments: Local Prep Baseball: Oakton & Madison win District titles; Regional tourney set.  I now cover all the local high school baseball tournaments in a series of posts throughout May and June.
• 6/11/13: The first post really covering college draftees with local ties, to go along with the local prep players.  MLB Draft Results for Players with Local Ties.  Now in 2016, i’ve got a running history of both prep and college players and can track those prep players who went to school in 2013 who are now draft eligible, so future posts are that much easier to write.
• Oct 2015: a series of posts reviewing the 2015 Season Statistical Review of all Nats 2015 draft picks and going back to the 2011 class.  I like this series and look forward to doing it again this year.

I guess I havn’t really done too many new features lately.

Count of posts by category: (note that these will add up to greater than 1000 since some posts get multiple categories):

• 30 for 30: 9 posts, mostly older.  I used to try to review ESPN’s “30 for 30” shows when they aired but lost track.  I still have several in draft form but they’re several years old and not worth posting at this point.
• Awards: 22 posts.  These are generally predictions for BBWAA awards and some in-depth analysis of fielding awards that I try to do every year.
• Baseball in General: 218 posts; these are usually the tag that I give to non-Nats, non-other issue.
• Chat/Mailbag Responses: 100: I really like doing this and keep forgetting that Tom Boswell does monday chats.  They’re generally arguable questions about the kinds of things we’re always talking about anyways; moves, trades, what should we do with so-and-so, etc.
• College/CWS: 32 posts; just a few each year covering the big CWS tournament.
• Draft: 76 posts, surprised its not more.
• Fantasy: 12 posts, which works out to almost exactly two a  year (one when I draft the team, one where I tell you how badly I did).
• Hall of Fame: 37 posts, which are mostly older because I have gotten quite sick of arguing about Hall of Fame voting.
• Local Baseball: 54 posts, mostly about High School tourney coverage, local draft candidates and even some Little League and local adult area baseball thrown in.
• Majors Pitching: 317 posts; lots of discussion about the state of the pitching.
• Minor League Pitching: 133 posts.
• Minor League Rotation Reviews: 29 posts; used to be more frequent, now just an annual check-in.
• Nats in General: 356 posts, the most frequently used tag.
• Nats rotation Reviews: 30 posts; as with the Minor League rotation reviews, these were sacrificed to the gods of time.
• Non-Baseball; just 33 posts, and only one since Nov 2014.  I guess I’m very focused on baseball here 🙂
• Post-Season: 54 posts about, well, post-season.  Predictions, reviews of Nats games, etc.
• Rule-5: 30 posts, since we talk about it over and over every year.  Ironically some pundits like Keith Law th ink the rule-5 draft is useless since such marginal prospects now reside at the ends of most 40-man roster teams, but I still think they’re useful precisely because those edge cases are so compelling to discuss.
• Weekly News: 22 posts, an older feature where I used to cut and paste cool links I had read on a week to week basis.  That’s crazy to think about now; i just scan through everything these days.
• World Baseball Classic: just 12 posts; but with another one coming up soon, we’ll revisit.  I cannot wait to see Cuba’s team this year.

Top 10 player names mentioned (since I started typing them in as Tags; this is definitely weighted more towards the the past season than earlier, as catching up hundreds of posts with updated tags is not an effort worth finishing frankly)

1. Stephen Strasburg: 248 mentions; lost of angst about him over the years.
2. Jordan Zimmermann: 193
3. Mike Rizzo: 185
4. Bryce Harper: 184
5. Ross Detwiler: 167; really?  How is it that he’s the 5th most mentioned player in this blog??
6. Gio Gonzalez: 163
7. Danny Espinosa: 139
8. Ryan Zimmerman: 138
9. Drew Storen: 138
10. Jayson Werth: 131

Items I wish I still had time to do:

• The rotational reviews, especially in the minor leagues.  I maintained these for the first half of 2011, but a vacation in July of 2011 left me a couple weeks behind and I just never could catch up.  I didn’t even attempt to try these for 2012 or going forward.  Its unfortunate; the whole reason I started this blog was to study and be up on the minor league pitching, especially the starters.  I feel, and still feel, that developing quality starting pitching is the most important aspect of the farm system, and that a successful pre-arbitration pitcher is the most valuable commodity in the sport.
• Nightly Reviews of MLB pitching performances; this requires the time to sit down each night and watch the games … I love baseball, but I just cannot commit that kind of time, especially with a young kid and a busy job.
• Actually going to eyeball these players in the minor leagues and not just rely on stat lines.  Again, time and life priorities.
• Honestly, I think I could do a better job “advertising” this blog.  Should I be pushing the

#1 item I wish I could incorporate: I’d love to do interviews of pitching coaches and pitchers at the various levels to talk about pitching strategy, mechanics and whatnot.  I briefly pursued getting a Nats press pass but got the impression that the team is less inclined to hand out press passes to blogs such as mine (which provide a heavy amount of opinion and commentary) versus blogs like Federal Baseball and DC Pro Sports Report (which act more like beat reporters and focus on doing pre-game and post-game reports).  Fair enough.

#1 technical issue I would like to change: I installed hit counters to try to gauge readership, but I still cannot reliably answer the question, “how many people read your blog?”  I have a plug-in installed to the WordPress engine called “Counterize” that gives me some sense of hits, but there’s so much garbage/hacker trolling going on that I cannot tell how many legitimate readers I have.

Post #1001 is coming soon after this one: i’m uncharacteristically going to do three posts in quick succession because I want to get the LCS preview/prediction post out before the LCS actually starts.  🙂  Lets you guys think I’m making predictions after the series starts…