It's your chance to rate the Nats on a travel day...

Those of us who follow baseball stats know that it's hard to measure defensive ability with stats.  Noted baseball stat guy Tom Tango (of The Book fame, etc) has another approach:  ask the fans!  Every year he does a web survey of fans, asking them to rate the defensive abilities of players in seven categories.  The idea is that we probably wouldn't trust any one person to give us an accurate picture of a player's ability, if you add up the impressions of a whole slew of fans, the "wisdom of the crowd" will give you a decent read on things.  Plus, it's fun to compare to metrics like UZR or plus-minus.

This is where you come in.  In order to get more "wisdom," you need more "crowd."  Go fill out the survey.  The link explains how to do it (most important: try to rate a player compared to all other players, not just to others at his position).  As fans, we potentially see a lot of baseball and see how our players stack up against a lot of other teams' players over the course of a season--put that knowledge to work!  Filling out the survey only takes a couple of minutes per team, and you only have to do the teams that you know something about.  You can also see the results of past surveys.

The more responses we get from Nats fans, the better idea we'll have of how we compare to other teams--as Tango puts it, it's a Scouting Report By Fans, For Fans.  Get out there and give your inputs today!