In this most recent bracket, which is done by a site that aggregates the brackets made by many others in cyberspace and comes up with an average position. I am skeptical of this braket matrix's credibility, but the matrix compiles brakets from a few repected authors. The "last updated" part indicates that our win against Kansas has not been factored in. kU is a #4 seed, so we could easiy fip-flop with them depending on how we do the rest of this week.

At times this season (okay, many times this season) it seemed as if our incredibly talented right-fielder (when he was actually on the field and not injured) forgot the basics of playig the outfield. Overrunning fly balls, misjudging careens off of the wall, the list goes on. Coupled with his many errors in only a month of play the previous season, I was worried that we had a major issue with fundamentals in RF.

However, as per this article, Jupton's defense was not as statistically bad as it appeared on the field. Due to fancy statistics that I only sort of follow, the rating that comes out puts the D-Backs at just barely above zero when comparing actual outs to predicted outs. The spreadsheet goes on to chronicle right fielders, where Justin Upton actually ranks 10th in MLB, delivering the D-Backs 6 outs above predicted, which the computer translates to 5 runs.

Since I really don't understand the math, I cannot assert the validity of these rankings. However, at least according to one metric, Upton's play in RF was not as bad as I had thought when compared to others at his position around the league.

Sparked by this article, I began thinking of the possibilities for the DBacks outfield next season.

Going into next season, the DBacks have a rather large logjam of players to play the three outfield positions. This logjam became exacerbated with Byrnes' injury, thus pressing younger players into service and requiring position switches. The beneficiaries of Byrnes' injury, CoJack and Romero, both played extremely well in light of the circumstances.

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