If you're a baseball fan -- and I suppose there's a pretty good chance that everybody reading this is a baseball fan, with the lone exception of my devoted-but-still-uneducated wife -- then I'll bet you've been annoyed by at least one of the big awards that have been announced over the last couple of weeks.

Just in the last few days, I have received e-mail messages arguing that Alex Rodriguez rather than Miguel Tejada should have won the MVP award, that Pedro Martinez rather than Barry Zito should have won the Cy Young award, that Mike Bordick rather than Alex Rodriguez should have won the Gold Glove at shortstop, and that anybody rather than Bengie Molina should have won the Gold Glove at catcher.

And that's just the American League.

Hey, I used to get annoyed, too.

Not any more, though. Well, OK, there is perhaps a twinge of annoyance for a few brief moments. Miguel Tejada may have deserved the MVP, but he won it for the wrong reasons. Alex Rodriguez wouldn't have won the Gold Glove if he'd hit 37 home runs rather than 57. But these are mere trifles, to be forgotten before, during, or just after my next trip to the little columnist's room.

Because the truth is that after holding my breath, year after year, waiting to see who the experts deemed worthy of their highest praise, I finally came to the inescapable conclusion that all of those experts, as smart as many of them must be, collectively don't know any more than I do. And in fact, they know less than I'll know if I spend a few hours doing the research that -- let's be honest, folks -- the voters themselves apparently can't be bothered with.

We might ask, what is the purpose of sports awards? To which those who do the awarding would probably answer, "The purpose of the award is to recognize the winner."

But that's not really the whole story, is it? Isn't the purpose also to tell us who actually deserved the award? Everybody thinks they know best, and I suspect most members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America are pretty sure that they -- and they alone -- are best qualified to tell us who deserves baseball's highest honors. And not only the annual awards, but membership in the Hall of Fame, too.

Those days are gone, though.

Within the last couple of years, the awards have become ... let's be honest again ... the awards have become almost completely superfluous. We've reached the point at which the awards don't tell us anything about the players that we don't already know. The awards tell us who the sportswriters like (in the case of the BBWAA's various awards). They tell us who the players like (in the case of The Sporting News' awards). They tell us who the broadcasters like (in the case of Major League Baseball's Hank Aaron awards). And all that is certainly worth knowing.

But do they tell us anything that we really want to know? That we need to know?

I don't claim to speak for every baseball fan, nor even for all of you reading this. But what I really want to know is, who was the best player this year? Who was the best pitcher? Who was the best defensive shortstop? And to answer those questions, one of the last things I'm going to check are the voting results for the various awards.

Instead, I'll consult Clay Davenport's various calculations for Baseball Prospectus. I'll track down Bill James' Win Shares for any players who I'm curious about. I'll do some digging of my own right here at ESPN.com, to see how the various MVP candidates fared in clutch situations (because yes, that does count).

Those are the sorts of things I'll do, but that doesn't mean they're the right sorts of things. My point is that in these amazing days of brilliant analysts like Davenport and James, these futuristic days of instant information at the fingertips of anybody with Internet access, we know -- or can find out, without a lot of trouble -- just as much about the players as the "experts" know.

And if we know just as much as they know, then why should we spend a lot of time worrying about what they tell us?

We shouldn't. We should care less and less with each passing season, because most of us are getting smarter faster than the voters are getting smarter. Yes, the voters are getting smarter. They're just not getting smarter fast enough to avoid their coming irrelevance.

Senior writer Rob Neyer, whose Big Book of Baseball Lineups will be published next spring by Fireside, will be appearing here regularly and irregularly during the offseason. His e-mail address is rob.neyer@dig.com.