I’m not overly interested in MVP postmortems. I’m happy it’s over, and we can move on to other things. But, yesterday’s results have inspired me to do one final post attempting to help a center fielder get the recognition he deserves for his 2012 season. And that center fielder is Austin Jackson.

24 different players were named on the 28 AL MVP ballots. Austin Jackson was not among those 24 players. Not a single writer saw fit to even throw him a 10th place bone. Seven writers found room for Alex Rios. Four found room for Jim Johnson. One found room for Raul Ibanez, which… you know, let’s just move on. But no one jotted Austin Jackson’s name down even once, even though he was quite clearly one of the 10 best players in the American League this year, no matter what way you choose to view baseball.

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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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This afternoon, Matt Klaassen detailed the NL Cy Young decision, which basically comes down to Clayton Kershaw and R.A. Dickey. Both had excellent seasons, and it’s essentially hair-splitting to pick one or the other, though as Matt notes, most of the hairs tend to fall Kershaw’s way when you actually do split them. Over in the AL, the story is similar, though in this case, the lines are a bit more pronounced.

Quite simply, there’s just not much of a case for anyone besides Justin Verlander. This isn’t to take anything away from David Price, who had an excellent season, but unless you’re still evaluating a pitcher by wins and losses, there’s really nothing you can point to that puts Price ahead of Verlander.

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Last year, the Tigers outfield was dreadful. Mostly thanks to the disastrous performance of Brennan Boesch, they flanked Austin Jackson with a rotating wheel of scrubs, and ended up using journeyman minor leaguer Quintin Berry as their regular left fielder in the postseason. Given how much they’ve already committed to winning in the short term, an upgrade in the outfield was absolutely necessary. Today, they made that upgrade by signing Torii Hunter to a two year, $26 million contract.

With Hunter, there are two competing viewpoints, both of which have their roots in factual basis.

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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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Bully for the 2012 Detroit Tigers. While the Tigers fell a little shy of winning the World Series, they did manage to accomplish more than 28 other teams, and they got as far as they did in large part by riding their superstars. Justin Verlander, obviously, was the star of the pitching staff, and Max Scherzer and Doug Fister did more to get noticed as well. In the middle of the lineup were Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder, and in Year 1 of that arrangement, there’s no room for complaints. It was the fault of neither Cabrera nor Fielder that the Tigers finished four games short.

From the beginning, Cabrera and Fielder were regarded as the toughest back-to-back hitters in baseball. On 161 occasions, Miguel Cabrera batted third, and on all 162 occasions, Prince Fielder batted fourth. Cabrera finished tied for tops in baseball in wRC+. Fielder finished sixth, between Andrew McCutchen and Edwin Encarnacion. The 2012 Tigers had two of the top six hitters in baseball. The Brewers had a good tandem, and the Blue Jays had a good tandem until Jose Bautista got hurt, but the Tigers’ tandem was incredible.

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With the final pitch of this past world series in the book, we now have two iconic series-ending takes in recent memory. Miguel Cabrera was frozen by a Sergio Romo fastball when he was perhaps thinking slider, and Carlos Beltran famously flinched at an Adam Wainwright curveball in game seven of the 2006 NLCS.

Of course that’s just two data points, connected only tenuously by situation (last out) and outcome (strike three taken), but it is enough to spawn a digression. Even if it would be kind of crazy to find out that batters swing less often as your average game progresses based on this starting point, crazier things have been born of less consequential moments.

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Earlier in the regular season, I got a message from a pitcher asking about how his slider rate compared to that of a teammate. It seems they had something of a friendly wager. I checked and replied that, while his slider rate was high, and higher than his teammate’s, neither was close to the league lead. Way up top were guys like Luke Gregerson and Sergio Romo, who threw sliders with nearly two-thirds of their pitches. Romo, for example, threw sliders like Clayton Kershaw threw fastballs. Romo’s got a pitch, and he’s especially got that pitch against right-handed batters.

Now let’s take a step back. Between 2007-2011, Tim Wakefield posted a roughly league-average ERA over nearly 800 innings. The overwhelming majority of his pitches were knuckleballs, a very small minority of his pitches were curveballs, and just over ten percent of his pitches were fastballs. His fastball had the average velocity of another guy’s slow curve. It was, in isolation, a very bad major-league fastball. Yet, on a per-pitch basis, between 2007-2011, Tim Wakefield’s fastball was one of the most effective fastballs in the league. You don’t have to do much research to figure it’s because hitters were taken by surprise. The fastball seemed faster than it was, and it was often simply unexpected. Nearly three in four Wakefield fastballs were strikes. There was nearly an equal ratio of called strikes to swings.

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