{"id":10167,"date":"2014-12-31T20:35:10","date_gmt":"2015-01-01T01:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=10167"},"modified":"2014-12-31T20:35:10","modified_gmt":"2015-01-01T01:35:10","slug":"nationals-arm-race-best-stories-for-2014-happy-new-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=10167","title":{"rendered":"Nationals Arm Race Best Stories for 2014; Happy New Year!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With little baseball news to report on this week, and clearly with us tired of arguing about <strong>Danny Espinosa<\/strong> :-), here&#8217;s a quick recap of the year in stories on this blog.\u00a0 From each month, I&#8217;ve grabbed a couple of the more interesting or unique posts I did, with thoughts and follow-on.<\/p>\n<p>(Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=8393\">2013&#8217;s review<\/a> as well, to see how far we have or have not evolved&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>Jan 2014:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=8421\">From Nats to Oblivion<\/a>; I love doing this post and looking up all these random guys.\u00a0 Believe it or not, even with the 1st place finishes and considering how far we&#8217;ve come from the 100 loss teams, there are still &#8220;oblivion&#8221; guys who play their last MLB game in a Nats uniform.\u00a0 I&#8217;m sure we&#8217;ll do another iteration of this post soon.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=8459\">Thoughts on Keith Law&#8217;s organization and prospect rankings<\/a>; I always think too much on Law&#8217;s stuff, but of all the major prospect rankers I like his thought process the best.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=8449%20\">Statistics and Rentention rates of Arbitration case players<\/a>; analysis of arbitration cases argued &#8230; which thankfully the Nats havn&#8217;t done in a little while.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Feb 2014<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Phillies are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=8534\">purposely sabotaging college player eligibility<\/a>; a shockingly petty story at the time; it has more or less faded after nothing much happened after the 2014 draft.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=1180\">Ranking Baseball&#8217;s General Managers<\/a>: it was hard to do then, and after this off-season&#8217;s GM shuffle its even harder to do now.\u00a0 Looking back, I ranked Sabean #11; his team has only won 3 of the last 7 World Series.\u00a0 I ranked Daniels 4th, Cherington 6th and both their teams finished in last place in 2014.\u00a0 I had Wren 8th and he was fired before 2014 even ended.\u00a0 Tough ranking to really do well.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Mar 2014<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><del><\/del>National <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=7022%20\">High School Baseball Powers<\/a>:\u00a0 first attempt to capture this information.\u00a0 Harder than it seems.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=7983\">Local draft-prospects to keep an eye in for the 2014 draft<\/a>; 2014 represented the first time I really closely followed local baseball to the extent that I did, and it started with deeper dives into local baseball talents.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve already got this post in draft mode for 2015.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Apr 2014<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=8768\">Qualifying Offers; are they working<\/a>?\u00a0 Short answer: I don&#8217;t think so.\u00a0 We&#8217;ll revisit this topic once the last two guys with Q.O.s sign this off-season (<strong>Shields<\/strong> and <strong>Scherzer<\/strong>).<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=8839\">Law trashes Williams<\/a> and their handling of Harper: Law posts in late April the same criticisms of Williams we had all year; bullpen management, lineup construction, handling of vets versus youngsters.\u00a0 Your 2014 manager of the year!\u00a0 Still incredibly bitter about the Zimmermann yanking in the NLDS (see below).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>May 2014<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=8817\">TJ Surgery epidemic<\/a>: upbringing, showcases and mechanics.\u00a0 I eventually published a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=8978\">second post<\/a> with a ton of TJ material for those interested in deep dives into the topic.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=8922\">DC\/MD\/VA District High School Tournament Report<\/a>; for some reason I really got into following the local high school baseball tournaments in 2014.\u00a0 I definitely will do this again in 2015.\u00a0 Even though these local baseball posts don&#8217;t get much commenting (nothing to really argue about I guess), I feel like there&#8217;s almost nobody else out there doing the same work.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>June 2014<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=9243\">CWS Super-Regionals recap and CWS field<\/a>; another topic that only I seem to write about; the College Baseball playoffs.\u00a0 There is a whole set of links following the CWS tournament from its field of 64 to its championship game.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=9166\">Who are the Nats targeting at #18 plus Mock Draft review of top5 picks<\/a>: I tried to keep track of all the mock drafts here; it was probably not an effort worth doing again.\u00a0 Nobody correctly predicted even the 5 guys who went 1-5 &#8230; let alone the right order.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=9083%20\">Strasburg-Cole matchup and a history of #1 vs #1 picks<\/a>; in what may have been the largest, most tedious research project i&#8217;ve ever done for any blog posting &#8230; i dug up the b-r.com links for every single #1 versus #1 starter matchup in the history of baseball.\u00a0 I could find no way to do it in b-r&#8217;s subscription query service, nor any other way other than brute force.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=9101\">A history of Pitchers taken #1 overall<\/a>; so much research went into the #1 vs #1 post &#8230; i turned it into this post.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>July 2014<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=9538\">Local Little League District Tournament Results MD\/VA<\/a>: continuing the theme of tracking non-professional baseball, we covered the local little leagues too.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=9594\">What is the benchmark for a &#8220;good&#8221; or &#8220;bad&#8221; draft<\/a>?\u00a0 A huge post talking about whether we had good or bad drafts.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Aug 2014; a job switch made the pickings and postings a bit light in Aug and Sept of 2014.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=9655\">Post trade-deadline playoff contender rotations<\/a>; re-evaluating the rotations after a ton of major trades.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Sept 2014<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=9734\">Rotation Reviews of your 2014 Playoff Teams<\/a>; I didn&#8217;t get enough time to do the typical playoff team analysis I do; i missed out on roster construction this year, one of my favorite posts to do.\u00a0 We&#8217;ll hope for more time next year.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Oct 2014<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=9863\">Would you have pulled Zimmermann?<\/a>\u00a0 A classic second-guessing blog post, questioning a manager move that back fired.\u00a0 I wish I had a time-stamped video of my reaction at the moment of the event so that people would know I wasn&#8217;t back-seat driving.\u00a0 Still irked about this, still convinced this changed the course of the post-season.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=9896\">World Series Pitching Matchups &amp; Predictions<\/a> (that you should laugh at); I finish off an abhorrent prediction season with an equally bad (and eventually wrong) WS prediction.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=9919\">Nats Payroll Projections for 2015<\/a>: where we hear the bad news &#8230; that we&#8217;re close to $150M on a team where $135M was &#8220;beyond the budget&#8221; for 2014&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Nov 2014<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=9934\">Nats 40-man Option status for 2015<\/a>: lots of guys out of options &#8230;. a precursor for a roster shedding ahead of the rule-5 draft.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=10000\">Rizzo the gambler<\/a>; how have his injury-risk signings\/picks done?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Dec 2014<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=10124\">What the Cuban embargo easing means for baseball<\/a>: also a link collection for stories on the topic.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=10097\">Post-Winter Meeting bonanza<\/a>; who improved their Rotation the most?\u00a0 Who&#8217;s left?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I only posted 130 posts this year, down significantly from 2013 (237 posts).\u00a0 But I feel like we have a ton more commentary now.\u00a0 There were 75 comments on the Detwiler post earlier this month!\u00a0 That&#8217;s great.\u00a0 I&#8217;m glad we have a great place to discuss and argue about stuff.<\/p>\n<p>Happy New Year and thanks for reading in 2014.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With little baseball news to report on this week, and clearly with us tired of arguing about Danny Espinosa :-), here&#8217;s a quick recap of the year in stories on this blog.\u00a0 From each month, I&#8217;ve grabbed a couple of the more interesting or unique posts I did, with thoughts and follow-on. (Here&#8217;s 2013&#8217;s review [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[135,110,1016],"class_list":["post-10167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-natsgeneral","tag-danny-espinosa","tag-keith-law","tag-todd-boss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10167"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10182,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10167\/revisions\/10182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}