Welcome to River-Dogz.com, a blog about the Washington Nationals and baseball. We’re modest: you might see some sabremetric commentaries here, but probably not. The three of us (Tom, Dave and Mark — to be official) are baseball fanatics — to be sure — but we’re not baseball empiricists. We love baseball stats, argue about them, and study them. But their importance, we all agree, cannot compare the baseball’s intangibles. And that’ll be our focus. We like to write, talk about, and endlessly agonize over the Washington Nationals (your Washington Nationals); then too (like all of you) we have day jobs. And each of us is haunted, no less, by the ghosts of the teams we love — for Tom and Dave that means the Red Sox and for Mark, the Cubs. But for all of us the Nats are number one.

So why river-dogz? Because Tom liked it, that’s why. We’re going to have a little Nats mascot that will act as our logo (a bulldog with a curly-W hat), eventually, as well as a number of other features — a surprise that will come in time. It will probably get us sued. We’ll just dangle that out there and let you guess. And we’ll have a couple of other features, humorous and poignant and even, we hope, insightful. Our pledge is that we’ll be entertaining. We know a lot of you already have Nats blogs and we read them and admire them. We hope you like ours.