I thought about leading off this post with one of those “Guess who leads the Majors in WAR among shortstops” questions, but then realized that I put Jimmy Rollins name was in the headline, so that seemed to not be much of a challenge. But, yes, Jimmy Rollins currently leads all MLB shortstops in WAR, checking in at +4.9 for the season. He’s been the lynchpin to the Phillies second half comeback, but on the other hand, he was also one of the reasons that they had a big hole to dig out of to begin with, because Rollins is having one of the weirdest good seasons in recent history.

Here are his monthly splits:

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It’s that time of year again – with just a few weeks left in the season, baseball writers are turning their focus to the postseason awards, and as usual, the MVP races are the ones that are going to get the most attention. In the NL, the conversation is mostly about finding ways to make sure that Ryan Braun doesn’t win his second straight trophy, with Buster Posey stepping up to provide BBWAA members the out that they so desperately want. Over in the AL, there hasn’t been as much discussion for most of the summer, as Mike Trout has been running laps around the rest of the contenders, making it hard to put together any kind of realistic argument for a non-Trout candidate.

However, Miguel Cabrera is having a monstrous September, hitting .373/.426/.797 over the last couple of weeks, and now that he’s taken the lead in both batting average and runs batted, the talk of a potential “triple crown” has breathed life into his candidacy. Jon Morosi went so far as to call the decision to give Cabrera the award “a formality” and say that it’s “obvious” that Cabrera is the right choice. Instead of engaging in a hyperbole-off, however, let’s actually investigate the actual differences between them this season and see whether the case for Cabrera actually stands up to logic and reason.

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In a couple of weeks, we’re going to be treated to a couple of one-game, winner-take-all showdowns to determine the final playoff team in each league. The addition of the wild card play-in game changes the context of the playoff races in a new and meaningful way, and also creates some interesting questions for a handful of teams. While MLB has had tie-breaking games before, they’ve never been known to be necessary until the final day of the regular season, and teams simply had to make adjustments to play an unscheduled game at the last minute.

Now, however, it’s likely that one or more teams are going to head into the final few days of the regular season essentially certain that they’re going to be involved in the play-in game. For instance, the Braves currently have a seven game lead over St. Louis in the wild card race, and even after sweeping Washington this weekend, they’re still 5.5 games back in the NL East. CoolStandings currently gives the Braves a 96.3% chance of winning one of the two wild card spots, but only a 3.6% chance of winning their division. Barring some kind of epic collapse by either the Braves or Nationals, Atlanta is going to be one of the two NL teams in the play-in game, and they can start planning for that game right now.

And, as part of that planning, they should seriously consider the idea of skipping the starting pitcher entirely.

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A few weeks ago, David Wright told Jon Heyman that he was “extremely optimistic” about the chances of reaching a long term contract extension with the Mets, and said all the right things about loyalty, about the franchise heading in the right direction, and about idolizing Cal Ripken because he stayed with one team for his entire career. Generally, when you have a 29-year-old posting a +6.7 WAR season who is openly talking about wanting to finish his career with your franchise, you’d be rushing to the table to get him locked up. And a few months ago, that looked like the easy call, as Wright was re-establishing himself as one of the league’s best players.

However, something funny has happened on the way to Wright and the Mets agreeing to a new contract that would keep him in Queens for the remainder of his career – for the last few months, David Wright has been pretty bad.

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I don’t really know what to add to this. Just watch and try to keep your jaw closed.

Yadier Molina is amazing.

Yesterday, Jeff noted in his post on the Brewers that one “could write thousands of words on the varying strengths of remaining schedules for the wild-card contenders.” He then proceeded to write three sentences, so apparently he meant someone else could write thousands of words on the the remaining schedules of wild-card contenders. Maybe if the remaining schedule could somehow have been GIFed, he would have been more interested? Anyway, I’m here to do the work that he decided to take a pass on.

With the Phillies and Brewers recent surges, the NL Wild Card race has gotten pretty interesting. The Braves basically have one of the two spots locked up, but who they’ll be playing is an open question. St. Louis and Los Angeles still seem like the best bets, but the Pirates, Phillies, Brewers, and even the Diamondbacks could sneak into the play-in game if they play really well down the stretch and get some help from the teams they’re chasing. In a race this tight, quality of opposition could make a significant difference, so let’s take a look at the slate of games left for each club, going in order of current standing.

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With the regular season just a few weeks away, we know many of you have turned your attention towards the off-season, and are coming up with potential scenarios you’d like to see your favorite team pursue this winter. So, to assist with comparisons and plans, we’ve created a custom leaderboard with all of the free agents expected to hit the market this winter.

There is some guessing required here, as there are team and player options that haven’t been officially decided upon, so we made the best guesses we could based on the information available at the moment. This means that we’ve included Jake Peavy and Dan Haren as free agents while not including Tim Hudson or Paul Maholm, though each is in a position to potentially have their option picked up for 2013, depending on what decisions are made by their current organizations. The nice thing about custom leaderboards is that if you don’t like some of the guesses we made, you can simply remove or add players and save your own version of the list with your own assumptions, so you’re not tied to the ones we’ve made. We’ve done most of the work for you, and you can tweak as necessary.

And, because it’s built on our leaderboards, you’re not limited to just the default display. If you want to limit it to players under the age of 30, you can use the age filters to just show the younger free agents. If you want to view performance over the last three years for more context than just 2012 performance, you can use the multi-year selectors to show data from 2010 on. And, you can play around with the data filters, so if you only want to see hitters with an ISO over .200 or a wRC+ of 130, you can do that. You can also save each report individually, creating a host of different FA leaderboards to peruse based on the filters you want to look at repeatedly.

We hope you find this tool useful. If you want to thank someone for the hard work putting it together, throw your kudos at Brandon Warne, and to David Appelman for coming up with the Custom Leaderboards to begin with.