We're down to the final month of the MLB season, and with most of the pretenders falling out of contention, now is a good time to flip the calendar forward and preview some hardware. With baseball being more of an individual sport than the other team sports, there's no shortage of arguments to be had.
Using the ZiPS projections for the rest of the season gives us a good idea about where the individual players will end up statwise, something that has always been extremely important in the awards voting (even if we fight about which statistics to actually consider). With the ZiPS forecast, I turned to two voting models: a Cy Young predictor developed by Bill James and a modified version of Jay Jaffe's MVP predictor that I updated with a few more years of data.
With these models and their historical error rates, I developed a system to estimate award odds, not just the predicted winner. So what did the PC come up with? Let's have a look: