You know it’s early in the awards season when…

Most Valuable Player: National League

3. Carlos Gomez, CF, Brewers: Season Stats: .367/.418/.644, 5 HR, 10 RBI, 4 SB

Prior to 2012, Gomez’s career-high in home runs was eight, and his .250/.305/.463 line last year represented career-highs in all three categories, so he is set up for a larger fall than most here. Still, one has to recognize how valuable he has been so far this season. After all, the reason Gomez didn’t wash out of the majors ...

Bryce Harper was robbed.

We just don’t have the endurance to wait. We want same day delivery. We want instant downloads. We want stream, we want push notifications, we want instant analysis. We are a refresh button society, and we pound that thing over and over to get the latest, the very latest, the absolute latest … and then we hit the refresh button again.

In other words, hey, look, every team in baseball has played at least one game now.

It’s time for our early season baseball ...

Welcome to the 21st Century: A perfect world of total pleasure.  With just one catch…

The Brewers opened Miller Park in 2001. As part of the effort to connect this 21st century stadium to Milwaukee’s baseball past, the Brewers installed the Walk of Fame the same year. Inductees in the Walk of Fame are honored with large, home-plate shaped plaques placed in the grounds around Miller Park… The inaugural class consisted of the inner-circle of Milwaukee baseball greatness: Hank Aaron, Robin ...

The new Greg Spira Baseball Research Award (www.SpiraAward.org) will be given annually in recognition of the best published article or paper containing original baseball research by a person 30 years old or younger.

Working with the Spira family, the creators of the Greg Spira Award include Sean Forman of Baseball- Reference.com, Joe Hamrahi and Dave Pease of Baseball Prospectus, Sean Lahman of Baseball1.com, and Gary Gillette of 24-7 Baseball, L.L.C.

The winner of the Greg Spira Baseball ...

I posed that question to Jack O’Connell, the long-time BBWAA secretary-treasurer, who announced the awards live on the shows.

“Any answer to my question about our giving away our awards while MLB network makes many thousands off it?” I asked in a second e-mail.

“The answer is that we did not give away the awards,” O’Connell replied. “They are still ours.”

I will give O’Connell the benefit of doubt and figure he misunderstood my question. My “give away” was not to be ...

And Rockwell never painted no guacamole and tortillas!

10. CARLOS PENA

Maybe this isn’t fair, but in our opinion the contact-challenged Tampa Bay first baseman was the player most responsible for the Rays wasting all that great pitching and missing the playoffs by three games. Because they knew Pena, the Rays went over budget and spent $7.25 million — the second-highest salary on their team — to bring him back to provide a desperately-needed middle-of-the-order power bat. Instead, Pena, ...

Here are the specific rules for this election:
Candidate Eligibility: Any North American professional baseball player is eligible for the Most Meritorious Player (MMP) award including players in the top Negro Leagues or independent teams. Voters should consider the player’s on-field contribution to Major League Baseball (MLB) team(s) in that season only. If part of the season was spent outside MLB, that value may be considered as well. However, the player’s on-field contribution should be ...

Here are the specific rules for this election:
Candidate Eligibility: Any North American professional baseball player is eligible for the Most Meritorious Player (MMP) award including players in the top Negro Leagues or independent teams. Voters should consider the player’s on-field contribution to Major League Baseball (MLB) team(s) in that season only. If part of the season was spent outside MLB, that value may be considered as well. However, the player’s on-field contribution should be ...

BBWAAH, must we?

Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun, who faces a 50-game suspension for testing positive for a performance-enhancing drug, is expected to speak at a banquet where he will accept his award for being voted National League MVP.

Braun will appear at the annual awards dinner of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America on Saturday in New York, a spokesman for the player told The New York Times.

“He will be there and he will accept his award,” Matthew Hiltzik told The Times.

...He ...

Weeee! More fun than Whack-A-Gerbil!

Still, the fact that Tigers ace Justin Verlander was named the AL MVP re-opened an apparent wound for Martinez about his distress in being snubbed in the 1999 MVP voting, a year when Martinez went 23-4 with a 2.07 ERA and 313 strikeouts but was left off the ballots of two writers (George King of the New York Post and LaVelle Neal III of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune), resulting in Martinez finishing second to Ivan Rodriguez in the race. Martinez also rankled ...

[Barry] Larkin getting in after a couple of decades or a Veteran’s Committee ballot wouldn’t add to Trammell’s cause. But Larkin got in on his third year of eligibility with 86 percent of the vote. Larkin wasn’t a borderline case—he didn’t satisfy the extra-super-special-first-ballot-bonus-points ninnies, but he was clearly a Hall of Famer in the voters’ eyes right from the beginning.

It’s that last statistic up there that’s the reason for the gap between the HOF perception gap between Larkin ...

Apparently “Craig” only needs a first name, like Cher, Madonna or Snooki.

This morning, Craig [Calcaterra] wrote a couple of compelling Hall of Fame-related posts.

In the first, he noted that attendance at the Museum is way, way down: more than 20 percent just from 2007 through 2011… In the second, Craig gave some Calcaterrian whatfor and whatnot to three Chicagoland Hall of Fame voters who have (again) not voted for Jeff Bagwell because of suspicions that he used performance-enhancing drugs ...

There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will the ballot be stuffed up?

Edgar Martinez – Called ‘gar’ after the fish that has lurked in reed lined waters still and waiting since there were fish and waters and lesser animals condemned to a perdition life of preydom and chased by higher forms make thinbodied and needleteethed by time or Godhand and touched with the breath of life. Called that by the denizens of a rain-soaked city not because he was thin ...

Also featuring interesting commentary on the also-rans!

Mark McGwire : I’ve documented my feelings previously (see the older ballots) on why I’ve switched on McGwire; it ties into my comments on [Jeff] Bagwell that I see my role as upholding the laws at the time, rather than retroactively legislating…

Jack Morris : ... Morris felt like a Hall of Famer. He did to me, for sure… And I voted for Morris in my first two years with this privilege.

But there are simply no numbers to support his ...

IT’S ALMOST 2012 AND THE METS ARE STILL LISTENING TO THE BEACH BOYS, MR. PRESIDENT.

AWARDS POSE PROBLEM FOR WRITERS

I offer the same suggestion for the Conlin award, though in his case there is a more difficult decision because his alleged acts of sexual abuse occurred so long ago – apparently in the 1970s – that the statute of limitations bars prosecution. In other words, the BBWAA will not have a conviction or an acquittal on which it could base a decision if it wants to decide whether ...

I’m not saying that Elston Howard was slow-footed…but the old Elston Howard Travel Agency in Fort Lee, NJ. did have a contract with Dinghy Cruise Lines.

Maybe they could all go in at the same time? Elston Howard? I was a wee lad, but hindsight suggests there was perhaps no greater beneficiary of the Yankee mystique in All Star and MVP voting than Howard.

I’ll look at that MVP race, but few players in history suffered more from circumstances than Howard.  First, he played in Yankee Stadium, ...

This news is actually a couple of weeks old, but I’m posting it mainly because I thought people might be interested to know that a set-up man, Chunichi Dragons reliever Takuya Asao, won the MVP Award in Japan’s Central League. After the controversy about Verlander’s MVP win, and some writers questioning whether pitchers should be eligible for the MVP at all, it’s interesting to look overseas and see not a starting pitcher, not a closer, but a set-up man walk away with the hardware…

“I can’t ...

“HAL: I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.”

In light (as dark as it is right now) of the Ryan Braun affair, may I please have my MVP ballot back.

Yes, I voted for Braun after thinking it over and changing my mind more often than my wife, Nadine, checking her menu at a restaurant.

Braun? Matt Kemp? Kemp or ...

Hey…how can Hank Aaron’s home run record get “asterisked away” when his was a single (guffaw) pep pill-fueled record to begin with?!

But in Braun’s case, if he’s guilty, this wouldn’t be hard at all. Everything would be right in front of us, in plain view. Just a short time before he got the award, he had failed the drug test; it was a banned substance, banned for the reason that it supposedly creates an advantage. Therefore, his season was advantaged. His MVP award was not based on playing ...

I’ve got to follow your advice wherever that advice may lead
I’ve got to follow your advice to find the love I needle…

No, this is not about doing the right thing by the Dodgers’ Matt Kemp, who finished second in the voting despite being better than Braun in nearly every important statistical category except victories. Yes, I’ve written about the injustice dealt to Kemp, but this is much bigger than two men.

Kemp should not win if Braun gives up the award.

Baseball wins if Braun gives up ...

In conjunction with the MLB Network, there will be four separate awards programs aired, with (as I understand it) a pair of awards per program, Monday through Thursday. Should be good programming, and more compact than in past years when the process was spread over a couple of calendar weeks.

That’s the lesser change. The greater change is this: According to the plan, during the week before those four programs, there will be a special to announce the finalists: three apiece for Manager of ...

Please, this is not to be meant as a condescending comment — Kaat has never won a Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

I’m happy for all the winners and the ones who didn’t win should feel good about being in the discussion, because they had to have very good seasons to be in consideration. Justin Verlander winning the AL MVP may have been somewhat of a surprise to some because you have certain voters — and there was at least one again this year — who don’t even give a ...

Milwaukee left fielder Ryan Braun, whose slugging and clutch hitting helped the Brewers win the National League Central title, was named the league’s Most Valuable Player in balloting by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.

Braun, who turned 28 last Thursday, was listed first on 20 ballots and second on the rest of the 32, submitted by two writers from each league city, to score 388 points, based on a tabulation system rewarding 14 points for first place, nine for second, eight ...

In Graham Land…things can get very lonely.

Obviously, I’m in the minority in this year’s MVP voting. I expected to be. I’m sure many wonder why I didn’t at least have Verlander somewhere on my ballot — second, third, fourth — if not first. My answer to that is this: If Verlander was going to be on my ballot at all, he was going to be first.

But once I decided I didn’t think it was fair to compare pitchers with position players for this award, meaning I wasn’t going to give Verlander a ...

Mor on, the Evan Grant MVP ballot.

Evan’s ballot, however, is not a disagreement between traditional statistics and advanced statistics. This is a question of credibility and whether Evan Grant has any after this absurd vote.

At best, this vote is disingenuous. I simply cannot believe that Evan Grant truly felt that Michael Young was the most valuable player in the American League this year.

... If Evan Grant decided that he wanted to use the ‘eye test’ to determine his MVP, then he needs ...