Continuing our exercise from last week, let's finish up our predictions of 2012's top performers and award winners. This week we'll cover the MVP candidates, and the pitching leaders.

Earlier this year we reviewed historical performance (in the form of RC/G and xERA) across each division and created a strength of schedule metric at the division level (i.e. an average for all teams in a division). In this article, we tackle two refinements to that approach—one improvement is the inclusion of projections (from BaseballHQ.com) to make it a forward-looking indicator. The other is the calculation of the metric at the team level to enable more detailed analysis and better insights.

As we do every year, we close out the pre-season calendar with a look at some possible long-shot league leaders and award winners. As always, our philosophy for this exercise is that anyone can predict an Albert Pujols MVP award or a Felix Hernandez Cy Young campaign. We're not interested in that level of prognostication; we're going to stick our necks out a good bit further.

As part of an ongoing series, we continue to explore how behavioral economic principles may assist in the management of your fantasy baseball roster. The week, we discuss how attachment and endowment effects may impact roster decisions.

One of the pleasant surprises of the 2011 was Jeff Francoeur who earned a career high roto value of $27, which was driven by 20 HR and a career high 22 SB. While the 20 HR weren't completely out of line for him (he had hit 29 HR in 2006), the SB seemingly came out of nowhere, after posting a previous high of just eight SB in 2011. Even in hindsight, there's no way we could have seen this outburst coming. Right?

It has long been a dictum of fantasy baseball that groundball pitchers are to be sought and flyball pitchers avoided. In this R&A essay, we’ll look at some high-level stats to see if there’s any validity to any of it.

One of our favorite annual pre-season exercises is to take our player projections and see what they can tell us about our expectations at a team level. By looking at the races on a division-by-division basis, we may find some teams (and players) that are not being properly valued in the preseason analysis.

Teams that win fantasy titles often have players on their rosters that deliver more value than either their draft round or their auction price would predict. Often these are players who have breakouts in one or more scoring categories that weren't anticipated. Three players who exceeded expectations in SBs last year were Emilio Bonafacio (SS, MIA), Jason Bourgeois (OF, HOU), and Ben Revere (OF, MIN). We can target players in drafts who have a possibility of returning significant profit in the SB category by developing a profile of players who have had a SB breakout in the past.

Platoon splits are a key part of the in-game management—but do they have any fanalytic value?

We continue our review of some pressing early spring questions, this week covering the National League.

Sergio Romo knows how to get Ks and weak contact. It's a powerful combination.