You Say PECOTA, I say PECATA

John at Nationals Pastime takes his always-invaluable look at the numbers. This time, with Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA forecast.

As we've been harping on all year, our pitching rotation looks solid. John says their number indicate we've got the third-best rotation in the East, but that adjustments for new players coming and old players going could bump us up solidly into the number two position.

As we've also been harping on all year, hitting is our weakness. The Nats are scraping the barrel offensively. With Castilla, Guzman, Chavez and the pitcher, there are a few too many easy outs for the pitcher. The Terrible Trio will have to work a little harder to avoid making as many outs this year.

John rightfully points out that these are probably only useful projections for the beginning of the year. Injuries, performance varation, trades, etc all will have a huge impact on the season.

There's a list of about 10 things that would need to go right for us to make the playoffs. I'm not counting on many of them. But there's no reason why this team couldn't play .500 baseball (yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm pretending that we don't need to score runs!) And considering everything they've been through, that would be a pretty damn good success.