Learning fantasy lessons in the postseason is a tricky affair. By its nature, a postseason series is a small sample. Also by its nature, a postseason series receives greater emphasis, fair (the games are high leverage when compared to a mid-season tilt) or not (they’re still just seven games). Even though the statistics are kept separately and are often out of mind, though, the fact that this is still baseball means that there is something that can be gleaned from it.

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Pablo Sandoval at catcher. Josh Willingham at catcher. Trevor Plouffe at shorstop. Allen Craig at second base.

Every once in a while, a young player comes up to the bigs in a unique situation that pumps positional-based fantasy value into their early career numbers. Most of the time, it’s because they’ve been attempting to man a position on their way up, and though it’s been obvious that they wouldn’t continue to hack it at that position, they’ve played enough games during the process of coming to that realization that their rookie season still features that remnant.

So Allen Craig will never be a second baseman again, most likely. According to Zach Sanders’ end-of-season rankings, the 28-year-old put up the fifth-best fantasy season by a second baseman in 2012, so he’ll be missed at the position. In rooting around for that lost eligibility in the bottom of the toolbox, you might notice a few other dings in your Allen Wrench, as well.

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Going into this season, it was obvious that Prince Fielder was leaving a park that was friendly to his lefty power and going to one that was less cozy. The difficulty in using that one fact to predict Fielder’s 2012 power was that he’d play half his games in other parks. So Chad Young and I tried to correctly weight the lefty home run power factors for each of the stadiums he’d see. Our answer was that he’d see a 6.7% reduction in home run production on the road. Combined with a 30% drop at home (118-88), he could expect a 18.65% drop overall.

Edit: Nailed it!

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Freddie Freeman improved almost across the board in his second season. He ended up ranked 15th in our 2012 final first base rankings (with Billy Butler added in), worth about $12. If you expected him to be great, that was a disappointment. Our staff thought he would be 15th, so we nailed it. If you picked him up for a dollar or late in your draft, you were happy with his improvements.

But what did he actually do? If we can figure out if he actually broke out, then we might know a little more about his remaining potential upside.

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Here are the definitions of each award, but the easiest thing to note is that draft cost is factored into most of our awards.

Well, duh. Even with cost factored in, Mike Trout ‘ran’ away with the hardware here, too. And (duh) nobody on the staff reached for this one, because, man, how many different ways can you say that Mike Trout was awesome this year, especially after all the real-life American League MVP discussions?

Here’s my attempt: Trout was amazingly consistent this year.

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The regular season is over, and fans of 22 teams are either rosterbating or sharpening their knives for awards season. Let’s jump in this fricassee with our own brand of blathering: the RotoGraphs Fantasy Awards. This week, our writers will be looking back on the excellence put forth in fantasy baseball this season and bestowing great honors upon them.

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Freedom from shame at least. They were supposed to be bold. So let’s revisit those predictions.

[Sorry no chat today, gotta get my stuff done before heading to the city for the Bay Area meetup. And sorry for abrupt ending last week, got an important call.]

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Hopefully we helped you win some gummibears this year in your leagues. Since we work hard at this, we would love to hear about your successes. Not that we ran your teams, but this is a collective on some level. I know I’ve learned from you and I hope I’ve helped you along the way. So when you gloat or brag here, you gloat or brag for the RotoGraphs crew.

Represent!

[Also: Bay Area people, come to the FanGraphs meetup on Friday at 21st Amendment! I’ll be there shortly after the early game starts, but we officially begin at four. See you there?]