MLB awards too late for my taste

If you haven't noticed, Major League Baseball is rolling out its big season awards this week. Rookies of the Year, Cy Youngs, Coaches of the Year...it's all leading up to the Most Valuable Players (obviously, each award has an National League and American League participant).

But my question is, do sports fans really care about end-of-season MLB awards this deep into the fall? Would it hurt MLB to push up its end-of-season awards up to the first round of the playoffs?

The NBA announces its big regular season awards during the first round of its playoffs. The NFL does the same in the week preceding its postseason. Why must MLB wait until two weeks after its postseason to announce its regular season award winners?

MLB could argue that fans are as locked in as ever into the sport now that the offseason trades and free-agent signings are beginning to ramp up, especially with the Winter Meetings slated for the second week of December. But the problem there is offseason moves encourage fans to look toward next season.

By mixing regular season award winners in the same time period that teams are beginning to frantically -- and in some cases, drastically -- reshuffle their rosters, MLB fans are caught between shifting their thoughts back and forth between the 2008 and 2009 seasons.

If MLB were to announce its regular season winners during the first-round Wild Card series, fans would enjoy the benefit of having the regular season fresh in their minds. That might make Evan Longoria's Rookie of the Year award seem more acceptable than it does now, two weeks after he went 1-for-20 (.050) with one RBI in the World Series.

Fans don't care less about the MLB MVP, an award endlessly debated in the NBA and NFL, for two reasons: 1) there are two MLB MVPS, one for each league, which is a rule that should be eliminated to make room for one overall winner, and 2) most sports fans are spending their valuable time tracking the NBA, NFL, college football and the impending college basketball seasons.

Considering that MLB, like every other major sports league, caters itself to casual fans (they already know they'll reel in the die-hard fans at any time), it might serve the league better to announce its regular season winners while most fans can still remember the season.