If you've been eager to insert some minor-league baseball into an early-summer vacation, your time has come. By the end of June, regular-season action will be under way for all five of the Washington Nationals' top affiliates, some of which will contain new faces that will have been acquired during next week's First-Year Player Draft.

By the way, if you're thinking of making the trek to Syracuse to see Stephen Strasburg, you'd better hurry; he'll be making one final triple-A start there in Buffalo [HT to Brian Dautch for the update] on Friday Thursday.  (That would have practically guaranteed a sellout at Alliance Bank Stadium, whose stated capacity is 11,071 but which reported ticket sales of 13,115 for Strasburg's most recent start last Saturday night.)

Less hailed on Saturday was the debut of onetime Nats rotation regular Collin Balester as a Syracuse reliever.  Balester took over for Josh Wilkie in the top of the eighth with two out and the bases empty, and retired the lone batter he faced.

Here's a look at where the Nats' farm clubs stand at the beginning of June.

• Vermont (short-season single-A): The Lake Monsters will play 76 games during 2010 in the northerly-tilted New York-Penn League, whose general experience level and June 18 opening day will make it the landing spot for some number of June draftees.  Will Bryce Harper be among them? Perhaps, but for that to happen would rest on a lot of assumptions that are worthy of a separate discussion, so let's just say "not in June" for now.  Second-year Vermont manager Jeff Garber will be hoping for a 2010 draft class with which he and the Monsters can better their 2009 record of 33-41.


• Hagerstown (low single-A, 28-23 as of the end of play on May 31): The Suns start the month with a five-game home set against Philadelphia-affiliated Lakewood, with whom they're tied at second place in the South Atlantic League's Northern Division.  Helping to keep Hagerstown competitive has been left-handed pitcher Daniel Rosenbaum, a 22nd-round selection in last season's June draft who pitched 37 high-quality innings later in 2009 at the Gulf Coast League.  Named Sally League Pitcher of the Week for the week ending May 16, Rosenbaum has accrued a 1.53 earned run average thus far in the 2010 season, having struck out 47 batters in 53 innings over which he's issued 42 hits and nine bases on balls. A promotion to Potomac some time in the next few weeks is a reasonable expectation.


• Potomac (high single-A, 23-28): Baltimore-affiliated Frederick is trying to run away with the first-half flag in the Carolina League's Northern Division, but neither the P-Nats nor their other two rivals are out of it yet.  The team may be less immediately concerned about the pennant race than about the return to health of top-prospect catcher Derek Norris and C-DH Brian Peacock, each of whom was recently hit in the helmet by a pitched ball -- Norris on May 21, suffering a concussion, and Peacock on May 30, after which a CT scan came back negative.


• Harrisburg (double-A, 25-26): The Senators are stuck mid-pack in the Eastern League's Western Division, where Pittsburgh-affiliated Altoona is currently in first place at 33-18. Harrisburg will be showing off the renovations to Metro Bank Park as the club hosts the 2010 Eastern League All-Star Game on July 14. Tickets go on sale this week at the Senators' web site, which will be offering a special pre-sale to its Twitter and Facebook followers.


• Syracuse (triple-A, 30-20):  The Chiefs are vying with Yankees-affiliated Scranton / Wilkes-Barre and Mets-affiliated Buffalo for supremacy in the International League's North Division as all three teams hover within a game and a half of first place.  Syracuse skipper Trent Jewett, a veteran minor-league coach and manager who's in his second year with the Nationals organization and first at the helm of the Chiefs, talks minor-league managing (and Strasburg) with David Laurila at Baseball Prospectus.

      

The unfailing harbinger of Spring for Washington baseball fans is arriving tonight, Tuesday, March 9, at 7:00 p.m.

That's when Kevin Goldstein, Jay Jaffe, Clay Davenport, Matt Swartz and Steven Goldman of Baseball Prospectus will be making their annual appearance at Politics and Prose Bookstore, 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW.  They'll be sharing some of their predictions for the 2010 season (including, perhaps, what they foresee from pitcher Stephen Strasburg), answering questions from audience members and signing copies of the 2010 Baseball Prospectus annual.

As is customary at P&P, admission is free and seating should be plentiful.  See you at 7.

      

Steven Goldman just put a couple of pieces of good news up on the Baseball Prospectus site which, as its dedicated readers will testify, is a haven for seekers of sensible baseball analysis.

First, the big Baseball Prospectus 2010 annual will be shipping next week to bookstores, and customers who have pre-ordered individual copies directly should expect them to be delivered to their mailboxes ere long.

As for this Hutch, we won't be buying a copy until early March, which is when the authors of BP have scheduled their annual appearance and book signing at Politics and Prose Bookstore on Connecticut Avenue in upper Northwest D.C.  The event is scheduled the evening of Tuesday, March 9, at 7 p.m.; check the P&P website for updates.

      

It's been a busy weekend.  Check out all the great stuff that NationalsPride.com managing editor Ian Koski caught and photographed at the Nationals' Winter Caravan this Friday and at Sunday's NatsFest.

Also, yours truly was privileged to have the opportunity to speak this past Saturday in Rosslyn at the annual meeting of the Bob Davids Chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research.

That provided an opportunity to start unrolling a set of predictions for what the Nationals will accomplish in 2010.  Not only were there quite a few Nats fans in the SABR audience, but Baseball Prospectus had raised some eyebrows last week when they pegged the Nats to post a winning record of 82-80 in the coming season.

Some of those raised eyebrows were the result of BP computations that turned out to have gone awry; they've since revised their forecast to 81-81.  But whether the number in the W column is 81 or 82, does it make sense?

Not from the vantage point of this Hutch.  Here, as unveiled to the members and guests of SABR on Saturday, is a more sensible NL East projection.

Future installments of this feature will explain how the numbers in the above table are derived.  For now, here's a synopsis of why things rate to shake out that way.

• Phillies:  A fairly solid team that mostly successfully addressed a short list of offseason needs.  Rotation?  Check.  Third base?  Check.  Back of the bullpen?  We'll see.  (We'll also see what they do next offseason when their veteran pickups are a year older.)
• Braves:  They've still got an outfield situation to sort out.  And an aging third baseman. And Derek Lowe.  None of these things portends hope.
• Marlins:  While the members of the starting rotation are all old enough to get driver's licenses, not all can yet be trusted to keep the ball within the confines of the playground.
• Mets:  Presumably their hope is that a revivified Gary Matthews Jr. can tee off on NL pitching as he could not in Anaheim.  Despite having surrendered the services of Brian Stokes, they've still got Bobby Parnell and Nelson Figueroa to lean on and have further buttressed the relief corps with Clint Everts.  Good luck with that plan, Omar.
• Nats:  Largely free of distraction but also largely free of superior starting pitching.  Boppers and bullpen can respectively push the record closer to .500 and keep it there but the middle-infield defense will be the story of the year -- one whose ending the team is praying will be happier than it was in 2009.

What's your take?

UPDATED 01-Feb-2010 5:00 pm:  BP has tweaked their formula again and now says 76 wins…

      

As the Nationals' front office heads into this week's Winter Meetings in Indianapolis, a bit of puzzlement attaches to their position.

Not that they don't have one, and MLB.com's Bill Ladson does a good job explaining it.  But Washington's stance seems to be biased toward incremental change, which Joe Sheehan at Baseball Prospectus ($) sees -- barring a major trade for prospects, of which he discusses one possibility in his article -- as about all that can be hoped for given the still-parlous state of the system.

There is money in the coffers.  Ronnie Belliard, Nick Johnson, Austin Kearns and Dmitri Young are all gone, and their $20+ million in salaries with them.  (Cristian Guzman and his $8 million salary remain, but it is not clear either whether he will play shortstop or second base or what he could fetch in a trade.)

Spending some of the recovered money to pick up free-agent pitching is an attractive idea.  Don't be surprised if the Nats bypass that option, at least with respect to any multi-year contracts.  A one-year deal to someone like free agent Jon Garland, whom Peter Gammons at ESPN ($) says they are interested in, is a more reasonable expectation.

Beyond Garland and a handful of others, though, the market for starting arms is fairly thin.  Moreover, lavishing big-bucks, long-term contracts on pitchers in their 30s is a strategy far from guaranteed of success (which might, for example, reflect the Angels' equivocal attitude toward free agent John Lackey, although he should still produce 150+ innings a season) and would thus be highly unwise unless just about every other piece were in place.

Which, in Washington, it is not.  For one thing, the Nats' needs at catcher still must be addressed.  But improving the middle-infield defense is paramount, and expecting a relocated Guzman and rookie Ian Desmond to do it alone would be foolhardy.  A signing of free agent Orlando Hudson or a trade for Florida's Dan Uggla would probably make it less tempting for the Nationals' 2010 opponents to field all-left-handed-batting lineups to poke ball after ball through what might otherwise be a very porous right side of the infield.

Whom might Washington send back in an Uggla trade?  The Nats don't have a lot of spare pieces they'd be willing to let go of.  (Local product Justin Maxwell might be one, which, as Ladson notes, could be a win-win if Maxwell thus got to play every day.)

And there's always interest swirling around slugging outfielder Josh Willingham.  The Mets, who are aching to avoid a repeat of their embarrassing 2009 season, are the latest potential trade partner whose name is being bandied about.

Whether the Nats will either acquire Hudson or Uggla or deal Willingham, or some combination thereof, is anybody's guess.  But given all the work this front office has yet to do to field a competitive team, Nats fans must be hoping that this week's meetings won't just be the beginning of another endless winter.

      

Whether or not you're old enough to remember when winning baseball was played regularly in this vicinity, you'll likely get a kick out of Baseball Prospectus' interview with onetime Baltimore ace starting pitcher Mike Boddicker.

Boddicker might not have thrown with the velocity of, say, Stephen Strasburg, but his ability to change speeds and locate the ball earned him 20 wins and a trip to the All-Star Game in 1984 -- just one season after his complete-game victory in World Series Game 2 at Memorial Stadium evened the Fall Classic at one game each for the Orioles and Phillies.  Baltimore would go on to win that Series four games to one, although little recking at the time that their victory would knell the end of two decades of dominance in the Charm City.

      

If you are a fan of any team in the National League Central Division, rest assured that your front office is busy these days working the phone (and the Net) to make trades in advance of the July 31 non-waiver deadline.

In particular, Pittsburgh general manager Neal Huntington would doubtless be very pleased to realize value in the form of prospects for players like fan-favorite shortstop Jack Wilson and rotation ace Zach Duke. (What's this we hear about long-term contract extensions for Wilson and Freddy Sanchez?  Huntington's purring reassurances make nice, feel-good copy, but his lowball contract extension offers to those players reinforce our expectation that the Pirates are open to remaking the roster to whatever degree they perceive to be profitable.)

Huntington, as well as his NL Central GM confreres, would appear to be looking at a pretty sluggish market for trades.  The sports business climate, like that of business in general, is dismal these days -- and isn't everybody looking to deal away their saleable pieces as they prepare to contend next year?

Shed no tears for Huntington. The other five teams in the NL Central are in contention this year, and suitors for his players are likely ringing Huntington's telephone off the hook. (We will explain that quaint metaphor to our younger readers another day.)

Baseball Prospectus' John Perotto argues that, with more teams still very much in the hunt than definitely (like the Nationals) out of it, this is in fact a seller's market. He lists interesting players on several teams -- including the Nats, whom he sees shopping outfielder Josh Willingham, among others. (You need to be a subscriber to Baseball Prospectus to see the whole list.)

Who might the others be?  Much as this Hutch loves 'em, and irrespective of what Baseball Prospectus might or might not think, our guess is that patient-hitting first baseman Nick Johnson and super-utilityman Willie Harris -- both able and useful, but both also just past age 30 -- are at the top of the Nats' list of tradeables.

      

The Nationals' last two contests have been distinguished by something not seen since May 2: consecutive games with no Nats fielding errors. (The previous streak only lasted two games, and only one errorless skein -- April 10-12 -- has stretched to three games, so don't get your hopes up.)

Much debate has bounced around the Natmosphere as to whether it's the defense or the pitching that are to be blamed for the current ghastly 12-29 record. Of course, both are culpable, and smart fans have had reason to be skeptical about whether wholesale bullpen turnover alone would cure the Nats' woes.

Why, then, can't we blame it on just the defense? It's also possible to take that argument to an extreme, as in the following example.

Ross Detwiler pitched five innings in his major-league debut Monday night. During those five frames, Det and his mates recorded 15 outs and three errors. Had the errors instead been putouts, Detwiler would arguably have lasted six innings, the Nats wouldn't have had to use so many relievers, and the opposing Pirates might not have laid waste to another great Nats offensive effort by logging nine runs off the bullpen.

It's hard not to think that way when you've just watched a 5-3 lead go up in flames. But the MLB-leading 43 errors that the Nats have committed this season don't quite tell the whole defensive story.

We need to look at another number, this one called Defensive Efficiency or DefEff. That might sound like nothing more than another shiny invention of the seamheads, but it's really quite simple:

• The rules of baseball being what they are, most batters for any team will put the ball into play. (A modest number will strike out, which is bad; others will draw a base on balls, which is good, or hit a home run, which is great.)
• Balls that are put into play result in the batter reaching base safely about 30% of the time over the long haul. We can think of that as a .300 Batting Average on Balls In Play (or BABIP). That number can vary for an individual offense, which is largely a matter of chance -- or for an individual defense, which is largely a matter of skill.
• When the ball is put into play and the batter doesn't reach base safely, the defense was successful.  That happens about 70% of the time, which we can think of as .700 Defensive Efficiency.
• Thus, the inverse of batting average on balls in play is DefEff. It's that simple. Subtract BABIP from 1 and you have DefEff.

BABIP averages around .300 over time, so DefEff should average .700 over time. In fact, this morning in the National League, those numbers are right on the dot.

Guess who's at the bottom of the National League in DefEff? That would be your Washington Nationals, at .673. The leader is the scalding-hot Los Angeles Dodgers, at .730.

The reason DefEff likely won't catch on any time soon, if it ever does, is that it involves a bit of computation.  We fans in the stands like our numbers simple, the kind we can tally one at a time, which is why Errors may well always rule over DefEff.

Still, we miss something when we ignore DefEff.  At times that something can be subtle and a little tedious to explain in detail, so we'll try instead to illustrate it with an example from 2008. (Go here for the hard numbers, but, as we say, we're going to try to keep this example soft.)

Say your second baseman was Chase Utley. He fielded a fair number of smashes, especially out of his zone. He thus created putouts on many balls that other second basemen -- say, Orlando Hudson -- might have let get by.

Who was the better fielder? Their fielding averages are virtually identical, and Utley committed more errors than Hudson did. This is because Utley played more innings in the field than Hudson and took more chances.

To cut to the chase, over a 162-game season, nine players who can field like Chase Utley will put out more opponents than nine players who field like Orlando Hudson. They will thus allow fewer runs and, given similar pitching and offense, they will win more games.

Not wanting to tax the endurance of our readers more than we feel we absolutely must, let's conclude with a look at last night's opponents.

The Nats, as noted just now, are the most defensively inefficient team in MLB -- and, perforce, the most defensively inefficient in the National League.

Who is the most defensively inefficient team in the American League? Until a few nights ago, the answer would have been Baltimore, but the Orioles' ineptitude as measured by DefEff has since been eclipsed by that of the White Sox, who seem to be trying mightily to outdo the Nats at inefficient glove work.

In raw numbers, our local teams would seem to be worlds apart.  As judged (however subjectively) by official scorers, Washington has committed a stunning 43 errors; Baltimore, a near-AL-average 27.

But in Defensive Efficiency, the teams are pretty close: Washington's is .673 and Baltimore's is .679. (Summing up and oversimplifying, Nats fielders are getting hit in the chest by balls that Orioles fielders would watch go by.)

Baltimore's record at this writing is four and a half games better than Washington's. But a six-point difference in DefEff should account for a one-game difference in the standings at most. Trust us on this one -- or if you don't, pick up a copy of Baseball Prospectus' Baseball Between the Numbers and dig into the article "Can a Team Have Too Much Pitching?" by Steven Goldman.

Oh, by the way, we need to examine that pitching question. We'll do so in the next installment of this series.

      

Operating consistently upon a principle -- viz., you can sink only so much hope into a guy before it's time to move on -- the Nationals parted ways with starter Shawn Hill a week ago last Wednesday.

Hill, remarkably for this economy (or perhaps not), was unemployed for only a weekend.  We are informed through MLB Trade Rumors that San Diego scooped Hill up on a minor-league deal and directed him to report to work in Peoria, Arizona, last Monday.

The commenters on Tim Dierkes' MLBTR report couldn't help but remind us that Mark Prior -- the one-time Cubs sensation who flamed out under the Dusty Baker regime in the Friendly Confines -- is also trying for a comeback at Petco.

Probably neither has much left in the tank -- Hill, perhaps, retaining a bit more potential than Prior, at least according to Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA.  Still, for the price of a couple of minor-league deals, Friars GM Kevin Towers and new owner Jeff Moorad may hit the jackpot -- as, of course, would either Hill or Prior if they were to catch the spark of a second career.

Anyhow, if you're visiting suburban Phoenix for the last week of Spring Training and happen to spy John Patterson in the neighborhood of 83rd Avenue and Bell Road, don't say we didn't warn you.

      

Spring -- which officially arrives today -- has its life-affirming rituals for baseball fans. One of ours, as readers of this Hutch may have suspected by now, is the purchase of the Baseball Prospectus annual.

Another ritual indulged in by the staunchest fans is attendance at a stop on the Baseball Prospectus book tour, of which there were two installments the other day in the District. We swung by Politics and Prose Bookstore this past Wednesday and enjoyed an evening's dialogue between BP authors Clay Davenport, Steven Goldman, Jay Jaffe and Ben Lindbergh and a knowledgeable audience.

P&P probably still has some autographed copies of the Annual, so you should pick one up if you haven't already. One caveat: this year's volume made it through the press without an index, so go here to print one and then stick it in the back of your book.