What a difference a year makes?

From 1-10 to 6-5. .500 baseball. Huzzah!

Not to rain on everyone's parade, but this year's start puts last year's in perspective:

          Runs Scored     Runs Allowed
2009         54              75
2010         53              66

The difference in runs allowed would actually only add up to about half a win.

QMAX is a system from the old Big Bad Baseball Annuals of adding some 'granularity' to the Quality Start, showing that some Quality Starts are better than others. 2009:
2010:

Click on the images to make them bigger. The blue area marks the 'Success Square' outings, where the combination of hits allowed and walks surrendered is good enough to mean you should win half the time. The red zone shows the 'Hit Hard' starts, games one is unlikely to win. There's not a whole lot of difference between this year and last: one fewer hit hard and an elite quality start, and that was Livo!'s of yesterday. That one also probably skewed our runs allowed statistic.

The 2009 edition of the Nationals underperformed badly. The 2010 one has overperformed slightly. You could put it down to Mr Rizzo's choice of 'winners' versus Bowden's 'lollygaggers'. You could put it down to a firmer hand on the tiller than last season, when Mr Acta seemed to be on borrowed time from the autumn, and MLB wouldn't let Mr Rizzo shed the 'interim' tag. You could put it down to luck. I know which one I think. How about you?