Introducing the 2015 SB Nation Awards!

Welcome to the 2015 SB Nation Awards! The season is over, and the BBWAA will start handing out its annual awards next week, so it's time for us to assign some e-hardware of our own. We did a set of SBN Awards last year, and you can click here to revisit those. This year's categories are a bit different:

- MLB Hitter of the Year
- MLB Pitcher of the Year
- A's Defensive Play of the Year
- A's Celebration of the Year
- MLB's Best Unwritten Rules Breakage

Each team site has been assigned the same categories, but beyond that it's up to us how to come up with our winners. So, we're going to do it like we do our annual Community Prospect List -- we'll come up with nominations for our first award in the comments section of this intro post, and then in the next post we'll vote on those nominees to determine a winner while collecting nominees for the following award in the comments section, and so on. Once we have winners for every award, the national SB Nation MLB site will select the best of the best for a final national vote.

Our first award is MLB Hitter of the Year. The specific meaning of that award is left up to our interpretation, and I think the best way to look at it is "non-pitcher MVP." That means you might take into account more than just a player's pure offense -- defense, baserunning, making the postseason, whatever you want really. Just don't feel like you have to exclusively focus on the "Hitter" part of the award's name, as I think it's just meant to differentiate between hitters and pitchers.

Here's how this will work:

1. I will kick off the nominations in the comments with a handful of obvious names.

2. To vote for a nominee, "Rec" the comment with that player's name. You can Rec however many of the nominees you want.

3. If you want to nominate a player who has not yet been nominated, then make a new comment with "Nomination: (Player Name)" in the subject line. Please double-check to make sure that the player actually hasn't been nominated yet.

4. On Sunday, at 9 p.m. PT, the nomination process will end and the THREE nominees with the most Recs will advance.

5. I'll have a post for you Monday morning, which will include a poll at the bottom so that we can vote from among the three Best Hitter nominees and choose a winner. In the comments of that Monday post we will nominate our Best Pitcher candidates.

To get things started, I'll be nominating the six real-life MVP finalists:

Bryce Harper
Mike Trout
Josh Donaldson
Paul Goldschmidt
Joey Votto
Lorenzo Cain

Amazingly, those first five guys finished in that exact order on both the bWAR and fWAR scales, so it looks like the BBWAA did a pretty good job picking their finalists. Cain ranked 8th and 9th, respectively, but he's also the centerpiece of the excellent team that went on to win the World Series so it's tough to complain about him being a finalist for the real-life AL award. Is there someone else you'd like to see on the list? Go ahead and nominate them!

Alright, let's move on to the comments! Vote which player(s) you think belong on our three-man ballot for MLB Hitter of the Year.