This Week's Natmosphere Round-Up

Reprising a weekly Friday feature that I did during the season last year, I'll be collecting notable posts from around the Internets, mostly focused on non-professional Nationals team blogs. Here are the posts I enjoyed most this week:

• Reax to Shawn Hill's abrupt release were widespread. Some, like me, simply assumed that there must be something we don't know. That group includes NFL and Nationals Enquirer. NFA and Chris Needham see the move as a necessity to make room for Joe Beimel. Everyone wishes the guy well. Hendo likes that they're opening innings for Martis and Zimmermann. FWIW, non-Nationals bloggers were generally far less forgiving of the move. Eric Seidman and Dave Cameron at Fangraphs, Sky Kalkman at BtB, and Lookout Landing all panned the move.
• NFA had a Q&A with smarty-pants LHP prospect Jack McGeary.
  
• OMG recounts the curse of the Nationals' #2 starting pitchers. Ouch!
• NTP wades into the Jordan Zimmermann nickname debate with a new offering: Hova. If you're going to make a Jay-Z reference, this would be the one. There are a lot of ideas out there, from BobLHead's ZNN, my own Flash Jordan, and the hopelessly square "J.Z."
• It's more than a week old, but OMG's cautionary note on Spring Training stats bears re-linking.
• Fed Baseball continued a series scouting Stephen Strasburg's starts for San Diego State with a detailed breakdown of his win over UNLV.
• Sean at DC Sports Plus does a little mind exercise comparing the 2005 Nationals to the 2009 group to see if we can exceed the performance of our beloved 81-81 (still last place) inaugural Nationals. (One note to Sean: the 2005 Nationals Pythagorean record was 77-85, so from a pure statistical perspective, you're going to need to beat that squad by 4 wins in order to make up for the luck factor.)
• Nationals Enquirer runs through Julian Tavarez's history of bad behavior, wondering what the clubhouse mix is like with renowned hot-heads Elijah Dukes and Scott Olsen already adding combustible fuel to the fire.