SPECULATOR: 2012 Longshot leaders and award winners, part 1

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 Félix Hernández Cy Young campaign. We're not interested in that level of prognostication; we're going to stick our necks out a good bit further.

Many of our nominees this year are players who have previously demonstrated the level of performance necessary to achieve these awards or thresholds. But, extending Ron Shandler's theme of "recency bias" from earlier this week, that performance level may not be the most recent data point in these players' career progression. By freeing ourselves of recency bias,...

More From Speculator