Just a couple years ago, it was Jason Heyward and Giancarlo Stanton that were tearing up baseball, looking like an unprecedented pair of rookie talents ready to continue on into the stratosphere together. Now, just two years later, we’ve got Mike Trout and Bryce Harper one-upping them. That’s just how it goes.

With an injury (and a team deflation) taking some of the wind out of Stanton’s sails, and Buster Posey blowing up the National League Most Valuable Player debate, the new toys got a lot more attention than the old new ones. Perhaps rightfully so. But a lot of the value Heyward accumulated last season he did in a fashion that might seem… Troutian.

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It has been a fun and exciting week of awards and the debates around them. Now it is time to get serious. We have just finished celebrating the best players of the 2012 season, whether or not one agrees with those officially recognized as such. Snarky jerks (present writer very much included) have had fun at the expense of the worst. Only one task remains: acknowledging those in the middle, the most average position players of 2012. One might think this is no big deal. I disagree. Isn’t the bulls-eye right in the middle of the target?

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It’s the bottom of the eighth inning. Men are on first and third base, there’s one out and your team is down by one run. The opposing team has one of the best ground-ball pitchers on the hill, and the infield is playing back and is looking for a double play. All you need is a fly ball to tie the game and significantly swing your chances of winning.

So who do you want at the plate?

It’s likely that the opposing manager will either bring in a ground-ball specialist or just tell the pitcher to stay away from pitches that could be hit in the air to the outfield. Knowing who you’d want to hit requires an understanding of what pitches are the most likely to induce a ground ball — and what hitters manage to hit fly balls against those pitches most often.

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The big news associated with the MVP award announced today will be the winners, especially this year with the Trout vs. Cabrera debate. Besides the winners, the below average players who receive votes get a bit of press. Today, I will look at another group of hitters, those who had a good season, but may not get a single MVP vote.

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On Wednesday, David Price was named the winner of the 2012 American League Cy Young Award, to some degree of disagreement. R.A. Dickey was named the winner of the 2012 National League Cy Young Award, to some lesser degree of disagreement. On Thursday, Buster Posey will presumably be named the winner of the 2012 NL Most Valuable Player Award, and Miguel Cabrera will presumably be named the winner of the 2012 AL Most Valuable Player Award. There exist some odds that someone else might win in the NL and/or the AL; those odds are long. Posey’s almost certainly beating his competition, and Cabrera’s almost certainly beating his competition, where by “his competition” I mean “Mike Trout“.

In terms of the attention it’s been given, the AL MVP race has dwarfed the NL MVP race. People more or less just accept that Posey will win, even though we don’t know exactly how valuable he was. The other side is heated, and it’s been heated for, what, months? At least several weeks. I guess “months” and “several weeks” mean the same thing. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of in-between. People tend to be either firmly on Trout’s side, or firmly on Cabrera’s side. Thursday evening, one side is going to celebrate. What’s funny is it’s hardly going to matter.

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We already know that the three finalists for the 2012 American League Rookie of the Year Award are Mike Trout, Yoenis Cespedes, and Yu Darvish. We basically already know that Mike Trout will be named the unanimous winner later on Monday by the BBWAA. There is no particularly convincing argument for any of the other guys over Trout, unless you pretend like pitcher wins are the only statistic that exists. You’ll know if Trout does not win unanimously because in that event Twitter would go down on account of all the Internet rage. It doesn’t take a lot to make the Internet rage.

The award itself is something that matters only sort of. It would probably matter a great deal to Trout and to Trout’s family. It’s something that would immediately go on Trout’s resume, and it’s something that would be brought up in any Mike Trout Hall-of-Fame discussions. The recognition would boost Trout’s self-esteem but it would not give him a new house, and it would not give the Angels more wins. It certainly means little to the fans. I don’t think fans care about the awards because of the winners; I think they care about the awards because of the arguments for which they allow. On the surface, there’s not much room for argument in the 2012 AL RoY. But what follows is an argument in favor of Oakland’s Jarrod Parker.

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Everyone knows that bunting runners over is the key to scoring and winning baseball games! No, wait, it’s dumb, and should never be done! Okay, bunting is sometimes smart, sometimes not. Isn’t sabermetric analysis of strategy great?

Jokes and stereotypes aside, it does seem that discussion of the pros and cons of bunting around the nerd-o-sphere is more nuanced than it used to be. While the allegedly old-school first inning, runner-on-first auto-bunt has fallen out of favor, we also realize that bunting can make sense for a number of reasons in certain situations: keeping fielders honest, increasing run expectancy, and occasions where playing for one run makes sense. As yet another annual tradition, let’s check out some of the most successful bunts of the 2012 regular season as measured by Win Probability Added (WPA).

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That’s right: end of the season, time for me to hand out awards based on semi-goofy. questionable stats. Along with the Carter-Batista Award, this is one of the first I started publishing.. In fact, my very first post at FanGraphs (three years this week! Time flies when you’re wasting it.) back in 2009 was a King of Little Things award presentation. You can also check out the 2010 and 2011 versions for the thrilling results. So which 2012 hitter contributed to most his teams wins in ways not measurable by traditional linear weights?

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Last week, the Angels shopped Dan Haren around the league, as it was common knowledge that they weren’t going to pick up his $15.5 million option for 2013, and were willing to trade him to a team that wanted to take a one year flier on a pitcher was among the game’s best as recently as 2011. Because they owed him a $3.5 million buyout, the marginal cost of acquiring Haren was really $12 million, the same amount that the Royals agreed to take on in acquiring Ervin Santana in the same style of trade.

While Santana found a new home, Haren did not, and after a deal with the Cubs fell through — after the Cubs supposedly pulled out of the trade — the Angels allowed Haren to become a free agent. So, now, he’s at the top of everyone’s free agent bargain list. And, given his skills and track record, the idea that a team could sign him for less than 1/12 seems to be a potentially huge bargain. But, given what transpired last week, we have to at least consider that perhaps Haren is more broken than is obvious from the outside.

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It’s decision time for the Los Angeles Angels. It’s decision time for everybody, but the Angels are a part of everybody, and like everybody else, they’re trying to figure out what their 2013 big-league roster might look like. They just traded Ervin Santana to the Royals. They were going to decline his option, and this way they effectively declined his option and also added a potential reliever. Now the Angels have to figure out what they’re doing with Dan Haren and Torii Hunter. A Haren decision in particular will have to be made quickly.

The Angels have until tomorrow to decide whether to pick up Haren’s $15.5 million 2013 option, or whether to buy it out for $3.5 million. Thus the Angels have until tomorrow to decide whether Dan Haren is worth $12 million over one year. From many reports, the Angels are currently trying to trade Haren, just as they did with Santana. Doing so would free up money for Zack Greinke, who is supposedly the Angels’ top offseason priority.

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