National League

Former Dodger closer Eric Gagne can represent the best of times as well as the worst of times for Dodger fans.

Some would say strains of "Welcome to the Jungle" still reverberate around Chavez Ravine. Others still feel disgust from the disclosure of his PED usage.

Wash away all the sweet and bitter and one fact remains, Eric Gagne's last dominant season as a closer is five years in the rear-view mirror. The chance of him recapturing anything close to that form is approximately equal to that of Tommy Lasorda passing up a free dinner.

That's right. Few will have the courage to agree with me, but I'm sayin' it anyway.

In 2009, the San Francisco Giants' superlative right-hander, Tim Lincecum, won his second consecutive National League Cy Young award.

The East Coast establishment of Major League Baseball watched in horror as the Freak made it two-for-two—two full years in the Show, two Cy Youngs—and did so in dominating fashion:

2009: 15-7, 32 GS, 225.1 IP, 4 CG, 2 SHO, 68 BB, 261 K, 2.48 ERA, 1.05 WHIP, 6.7 H/9, 10.4 K/9, .206 BAA, .271 OBPA, .290 SLGA, .561 OPS

This year 171 players filed for free agency.

Of the 171 total free agents, 99 are from the National League and 72 are from the American League.

Unlike last year’s class of free agents, only a select few in this crop figure to land blockbuster deals.

Seeing how it is award season now, with the Rookie of the Year awards coming within the next hour, I thought it'd be good to look at this past decade as a whole and name my awards.

While it will be difficult to name the Rookie of the Year as a decade (you'll see what I'll do there), I'm throwing in a new category and replacing an old.

No more Most Valuable Player. We're talking Player of the Decade for each league, and let us not forget the franchise of the decade for both leagues.

Forward, march!

There are lots of worldly occurrences that make absolutely no sense to me. For instance, popular American culture is apparently obsessed with vampires at the moment.

Vampires? Really? Who signed off on this?

My faith in a benevolent Higher Power has me convinced there's a bunch of television executives somewhere laughing themselves silly at the gag. The phenomenon has to be a perverse bet between suits a la the Duke Brothers in Trading Places—"I'll bet you a dollar we can get the masses to go crazy about anything if we throw enough production behind it."

Sometimes I wish baseball would get with the program.

It just perplexes me that Bud Selig allows one league to play one style of baseball and the other league to play another style of baseball.

The disconnect between the style of play is all over one position: the DH.

The American League has it, the National League doesn't, hence the different style of play in both leagues.

With the World Series now going on, one league's players are always at a disadvantage because each home ballpark calls for a different adherence to the rules.

Los Angeles Angels pitcher, John Lackey stands to make a lot of money this winter.

Lackey, who won one game and posted an ERA just a shade above 2.30 in L.A.'s playoff run, will enter the free agent market as the top starting pitcher available.

I wouldn't want to be a Los Angeles Dodger fan for a variety of reasons, mainly because I've lived in San Francisco or its suburbs for most of the last 22 years. As such, I'm a die-hard fan of the Giants and I loathe the Bums.

At this particular moment, however, I wouldn't want to follow the beautiful Dodger blue for one, specific reason: the national media is setting them up for a fall. They're being sacrificed at the altar of commerce and wishful thinking is taking the place of objective analysis to do the job.

I'm a shade unclear as to the specific voting rules for Major League Baseball's regular season awards. Common sense would dictate the writers who select the winners have to wait until the last of the 162 games (including any one-game playoffs that might be necessary) so that they have a complete data set.

If that's the case, the official tallies should begin rolling in once the Minnesota Twins and Detroit Tigers finish up their hostilities on Tuesday.