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.

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.

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.

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

In our 2012 debut, we speculate on eight interesting spring questions from around the American League.

A look ahead at what you might see covered in our Playing Time Today column on September 16, 2012...

This week, we present eight young hitters with the potential to be 2012's version of Alex Gordon or Cameron Maybin: