Regular season baseball is over, and fall is starting to set in. It’s time for the play-offs and oh, so many useless awards that seems to leave everyone angry except for the winners.

Well, I’m no different from any other sports fan; I think that I have the most intelligent way for the awards to be doled out.

The National League seems to be the league with the most obvious winners, so I’ll start there.

The Rookie of the Year category is the hardest category to pick of the four.

Since there is no 13-year-old phenom with a 99 mph fastball, it will be especially hard this year.

Todd Hollandsworth appears to be the most consistently impressive rookie this year.

The obvious knock is that he is a Dodger, and they have only won the last billion Rookie of the Year awards.

Another award that is still debatable is the MVP. Ken Caminiti is the frontrunner and after this weekend series against the Dodgers where he stole the West from the Dodgers, he sewed it up.

Ellis Burks is another fine choice for the MVP award, but he resides in Coors Field, and it will be a while before the voters recognize any batter from the hitter-friendly park.

That is fine, but the accomplishments the overachieving Expos made under the tutelage of Felipe Alou should not be forgotten.

Another person who should not be forgotten is John Smoltz who deserves the prestigious Cy Young award, but Kevin Brown deserves some recognition for his feats this year.

His ERA was 1.89 this year, and that is simply phenomenal considering he had the lowest run support in the majors and wasn’t even on a contending team all year. Now my only question is: why he couldn’t he pitch that way for the Orioles last year?

That brings us to the superior league — the American League.

What really angers me in the American League is that all the sports gods want to give Andy Pettitte the coveted Cy Young award.

The problem is that if they give the CY Young to Pettitte, then no one is going to covet the award anymore. An ERA of 3.87 would be the worst ERA ever of a Cy Young winner by far!

The only candidate that deserves this award is Pat Hentgen.

Who?

He’s only the staff ace of the Toronto Blue Jays who finished the year with a 20-10 record and a 3.22 ERA.

These are not excellent numbers, but they are great, and combined with the fact that he has pitched 10 complete games for a non-contender, he should be a lock.

Alex Rodriguez is the LOCK for the AL MVP, and he deserves it. However, since I already have mentioned plenty of unlikely candidates, why not another one?

Brady Anderson of the Orioles deserves some award for the year he has had. He was considered to be a weak link of a very strong Orioles team, but he has been the strongest member belting fifty taters, and hitting around .290 all year.

The obvious pick for AL Rookie of the Year is Derek Jeter, and although he is one of the hated Yankees, I have no qualms with this choice.

Cade Remsburg is a senior in Journalism from Ames.