Today is the day that the position players of the Nationals and the Tigers report to spring training camp, so I thought it a good idea to end the hiatus that this blog has experienced. I've been meaning to end the hiatus since late November, when I wanted to pen a response to the Fister trade, among others, but life has a way of pushing one off course just a tad. Why do I bring up the Tigers on what is a blog ostensibly about the Nationals? Well, I spent my early childhood as a fan of the Tigers, and only started looking at National League teams after the introduction of the designated-hitter rule. In the aftermath of the move of the Expos to Washington, I kind of drifted back to the Tigers, and was quickly greeted by the magical 2006 season. When I'm not following Nationals' baseball, I'm off in the American League with the Tigers, so I thought I'd adjust the content of the blog to reflect that. During the Nationals' miserable years of 2007 and 2008, when the 'new toy' gloss had worn off and it was just painful to watch, I spent a lot of time in TigerTown. Curiously, it was the ugly trainwreck that was the 2009 team that caused me to resume paying deeper attention to the Nationals. I find bad teams that look like they are putting together the ingredients to go somewhere far more interesting than a good team where everything is neatly set up for another run at a pennant.
A very good reason for me in particular to resume baseball blogging in 2014 is that this represents the tenth anniversary of the last season of the Montréal Expos. Or, really, the MLB Expos: the Montréal Expos' last season was really 2001. After that, in hindsight, the franchise was very much, in Montréal terms, in a coma, from which it would never wake up. We had a zombie franchise, as the 'brains' of the Expos' organisation mostly followed ownership to the (then) Florida Marlins. So, this blog is also going to pay some attention to the franchise that I think most resembles what a 2014 Expos team would be like.
So, that's the sort of team-focused content to look forward to here. In addition, I shall also write a bit about sabermetric fielding systems such as UZR, TotalZone and Humphrys' DRA, plus anything else that catches my fancy in terms of baseball history. (I am currently working on a large historical project in this vein.) The only cloud on the horizon in terms of generating content is the possibility that I might move back to Blighty, in which case it'll be a 'wait 'til next year' situation.
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