Kuzul

Roy Halladay is the National League’s Cy Young Award winner for the 2010 season. That much is certain, and why wouldn’t he be? He led the league in wins, complete games, innings pitched, shutouts, and finished in the top three in every other statistic of importance.

As for the others that could be considered, Johnson doesn’t have the wins, Jimenez’s ERA is much higher than the other three, and Wainwright falls just slightly behind Halladay in nearly everything, and looks to be the second place finisher. Besides, none of those three teams made the playoffs, which does factor into Cy voting; whether it should or not is a discussion for another time.

This is certainly not the first time that a pitcher had shown to be a clear choice for the Cy Young Award. In fact, it seems to happen fairly frequently. Over the last 25 years, there are 15 instances of very easy selections for the Cy Young Award.

Multiple winners are limited to two appearances on this slide for more variation, so Clemens or Maddux isn’t going to show up 4+ times.

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The 2010 season reached its conclusion and that can only mean one thing: The hot stove season is underway!

How will your team upgrade this offseason?

An integral part of any team is its closer. Look no further than the World Series champion Giants, a team that had a lights out postseason from closer Brian Wilson. It was an essential key to their success.

Having a reliable closer makes it so much easier on fans and coaches alike. A shaky closer can raise any manager’s blood pressure.

If you’re a fan of the Mets, Angels, Blue Jays, Rays, White Sox, Nationals, Marlins, Braves or Red Sox, pay attention.

Here are the power rankings for the top 10 free-agent pitchers that have the ability to be solid closers in 2011.

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The National League Rookie of the Year announcement was made earlier today, and Giants catcher Buster Posey deservedly took home the honor. He received 20 of the possible 32 first-place votes, and beat out fellow phenom Jason Heyward of the Atlanta Braves.

Posey helped lead the Giants to the World Series title, and he could also be considered an NL MVP candidate for his contributions.

With Posey’s great season, this is a good time to look back at some of the other great debut seasons posted by catchers recently, as catcher may be the toughest position to man as a rookie.

So here are the top 10 seasons from rookie catchers in the past 20 years, including this year’s phenom, Buster Posey.

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Each season, players seemingly come out of nowhere and become catalysts for their team. Whether it is a high-profile rookie, a second-year player, or simply someone who finally got their chance, new stars pop up each and every season.

What follows is a list of the 25 players most likely to breakout in 2011. There are a number of top prospects on the list, as well as some former top prospects who have still not lived up to their high billing.

So as the offseason wheelings and dealings begin to unfold, here are the 25 guys who will make their teams better with a breakout season in 2011.

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In honor of one of the best pitching matchups in NLCS history between the Phillies and Giants starting Saturday night, here are 10 matchups that had the same amount of hype that Halladay-Lincecum, Oswalt-Cain and Hamels-Sanchez provide.

In the past 20 years, many matchups have gotten hype. The most memorable hype for a series had to have been in 2001 when the Diamondbacks and Braves battled it out with five future Hall of Famers,

This list focuses only on individual game pitching matchups.

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At the time of year when all the talk is of MVP hitters and Cy Young pitchers, many important players are often not even considered. Although MVP does include the term valuable, that award is usually given to the player who has produced the most offense, and the Cy Young to the pitcher with the lowest Earned Run Average.

But there are so many more players—25 per team and 200 in the postseason total—all of them designated to a certain role. But the production of some players is more important to their team than others. So which players will be the most heavily relied on in this year’s playoffs? 

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Barry Zito. Vernon Wells. Mike Hampton.

It doesn’t matter how much money is at stake, Major League GM’s make a lot of mistakes. Few names prove as much better than the three players listed above.

Some bad moves are avoidable. Some are not. But every offseason, every trade deadline, some general manager is going to make a move he thinks will help his team, only to see it backfire and eventually cost him his job.

2010 has certainly not been immune to bad deals. Adrian Beltre, Marlon Byrd, and Vladdy may have been terrific pickups for their current teams, but free agency is a zero-sum game. Somebody always loses.

Hindsight is 20/20, and with that in mind, let’s rank the 20 worst deals of the last year, from the 2009-10 offseason to the 2010 trading deadline.

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Say what you want about the problems with MLB‘s current playoff system. You can bemoan the addition of the Wild Card, or whine about how home field advantage for the World Series is determined by the All-Star Game, or complain that a best-of-five series is a poor way to determine which of two good teams is superior.

But when the first round kicks off on Wednesday, don’t pretend that you won’t be watching.

The postseason is when heroes are made. It’s when role players become household names, and stars aim to reach immortality. I know it sounds like a cheesy MLB Network commercial, but I defy any baseball fan to disagree.

In this slideshow are the 25 players who have had the best postseason careers in MLB history. Because this is about the career as a whole, I tried to make rankings relatively context-neutral, so a clutch hit or a walk-off homer didn’t matter as much as they would have in, say, a “top postseason moments” article.

If someone you think deserves to be here didn’t make the cut, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t considered—my original list had 75 names, meaning 50 nearly worthy players almost made it in.

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With the 2010 regular season coming to a close and the playoff picture starting to become a little clearer every day, there are some teams that will focus on free agency and which players they are going to bring back or which players they could possibly land this offseason.

One of those players that will hit the free agent market is third baseman Adrian Beltre, who seemed to reinvent himself this season as a member of the Boston Red Sox.

Beltre has hit .325 with 28 home runs and 102 runs batted in, his best combined numbers since his 2004 season as a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Beltre isn’t the only third baseman that will be on the market. Here are 10 of the top third basemen that will be looked at in free agency.

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As the regular season wraps up, many teams and their fans are looking to October and, they hope, a World Series win. For other teams and their fans, they are looking to the offseason, hoping to make a few trades or free agent acquisitions to bounce them back into contention.

In some situations, these trades end up paying huge dividends, and not always for the party that was looking to get the major piece. At the same time, once in a while there’s a great free agent pickup at a bargain that launches a team into the playoffs and a World Series ring.

Starting with the 1999-2000 offseason through this past one, this slideshow notes the 20 best steals of the past decade. Some may have slipped by me, as there’s nowhere to easily find these unless one has an institutional memory of these things.

The years listed in the slides is the offseason that it took place in. i.e. a trade from November 2000 to March 2001 will be listed as 2000.

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