Our nation, you might have heard, is divided. Two sets of outwardly reasonable people look at the same facts and come away with radically different conclusions. Elections drive those sets of people to cast ballots in what now seems like two nations coexisting in the same borders. But now the overwhelming rancor of the campaign is over and the voters have spoken and the election, as these things go, did not turn out to be very close at all.  Buster Posey during the second game of the World Series against the Tigers on Oct. 25.  Yes, Detroit’s Miguel Cabrera was named most valuable player of the American League.  In case you hadn’t noticed, perhaps because you make a habit of not noticing such things, the A.L.'s big kahuna award turned into an ideological brouhaha among the voting constituency of certain baseball writers. The old-school, stick-in-the-mud types were all for crowning Cabrera for all of those traditional stick-in-the-mud reasons, like more home runs and runs batted in and leading his team to the playoffs. Their traditional values exalted Cabrera’s triple crown, the first in 45 years. The new-school statistical guys howled and brandished their slide rules in arguing the Angels’ Mike Trout was an all-around better player and supremely awesome in the ways that matter to the new generation. Can you believe that Wins Above Replacement number? I mean, wow!  If you tuned into the baseball geek chatter over the last few weeks, you would have gotten an earful of this, which might have been preferable to listening to the big election chatter, but might have driven you mad all the same. As Tim Brown writes on Yahoo.com, this got personal and a little ugly. Those who believed the “real” numbers favored Trout, like David Schoenfield of ESPN.com and The Times’s polling guru, Nate Silver (as if you needed any more election connections), and wanted their philosophy to prevail. Mitch Albom of The Detroit Free Press believes Cabrera represented real baseball over mathematics. Scott Miller argues on CBSSports.com that Cabrera won out on the strength of statistics, lineup presence and value to his team. In the end, the vote was not close, and as Jon Paul Morosi soberly writes on Foxsports.com, it did not settle any larger debate.  Oh, and somewhere in the middle of that catfight, San Francisco’s Buster Posey won the National League award. Absolutely no one was arguing about that because Posey is completely uncontroversial and might be superhuman, as Ann Killion writes in The San Francisco Chronicle.  The N.F.L., as is its world-dominating wont, would have loved to steal all that attention Thursday night, but the best it could offer was the Dolphins playing the Bills in its midweek game. Sure, it might have been a breakout night for C.J. Spiller and the Bills’ defense, as Chris Burke writes on SI.com, but neither team is keeping Bill Belichick up at night, as James Walker writes on ESPN.com.  The other N.F.L. news of the day was 49ers Coach Jim Harbaugh undergoing a procedure for an irregular heartbeat, which was apparently minor enough that we can joke about the biggest revelation being that Harbaugh has a heart. Oh, and the Jets owner Woody Johnson isn’t happy with his losing, bickering team. Stop the presses.  In more depressing news, the N.H.L. and the players union are still shadowboxing their way into oblivion with the latest report being Mr. Armageddon Gary Bettman suggesting they all take a two-week break to dig even more cozily into that oblivion. There was an even more disturbing report involving the former basketball star Chamique Holdsclaw, who is accused of smashing in the windows of, and then shooting into, the car of the W.N.B.A. player Jennifer Lacy.  Thank heavens the baseball most valuable player debate did not come to that. Instead, it was an excess of fuss and not that close a result. Why does that sound so familiar?  Follow Leading Off on Twitter: twitter.com/zinsernyt
Tradition prevailed in deciding that Miguel Cabrera was the American League most valuable player, and Buster Posey won in the N.L. without debate.