I was going to start this by saying how sorry I feel for Albert Pujols and Adrian Beltre, because neither one of them are going to win the National League MVP award as long as Barry Bonds is still playing.

But that’s overkill, like saying you feel sorry for the Queen of England because the Sultan of Brunei has a better pastry chef. No matter how distressing your little setback may be, life is still good.

Still, it’s not perfect. Pujols should be looking at probably his second MVP this season, wondering only if teammates Jim Edmonds and Scott Rolen would take enough votes away from him to let Beltre win his first. Instead, all wondered which of them would finish second to Bonds.

And it’s not hard to see how Bonds won his fourth straight MVP award and seventh overall. Despite being walked 232 times and being limited to 373 official at-bats, he scored 129 runs, drove in 101, hit 45 home runs and struck out only 41 times.

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In 2003, Bonds’ on-base average was .582, 30 points better than the previous record, set by Ted Williams in 1941. This year, he added another 27 points to that, finishing the year with a .609 on-base average.

The award is about value, and there can be no question that no one in baseball was more valuable to his team than Bonds was last year; it’s possible no player has ever been as valuable to any team. For every 10 trips to the plate, he was on base six times.

The list of negative adjectives you can use to describe Bonds’ personality is limited only by the size of the dictionary you’re using. Once upon a time, in 1941, when Ted Williams hit .406 and was the best player in the American League, his unpopularity with the Boston writers kept him from winning the MVP, which went to Joe DiMaggio, who had his 56-game hitting streak that year.

It may be hard to believe, but today’s writers aren’t as vindictive as those of yore. In 1941, vindictive was leaving Williams off one ballot entirely. Today, vindictive is voting Bonds second instead of first. And that wouldn't have kept him from winning, because most of the writers who vote for MVP, and there are two in each National League city, vote for the best player, regardless of what they think of him.

That’s why it’s Bonds is the 2004 NL MVP.

Without him, you would have a legitimate argument between Pujols and Beltre. Pujols has had the best four-year start to a career ever, and he just keeps getting better. Last year, he hit .331 with 46 home runs, 123 RBIs, 133 runs and a .657 slugging percentage. The last American League MVP to have better numbers was Frank Thomas in 1994.

Beltre led the majors with 48 home runs last year. He hit .334 with 104 runs, 121 RBIs and a .629 slugging average.

These are great years, MVP years. If it were just the two of them, I’d say Beltre would win, because he was clearly the best player on the Dodgers. Pujols would finish second because his teammates, Rolens and Edmonds, also had terrific years. It’s hard to say the Cards couldn’t have won without Pujols when they had the best offense in the game and ran away with their division.

But if you put Beltre, Rolens or Pujols in the American League, any one of them would probably win the MVP easily. And you couldn’t blame them if they were wondering why they had the misfortune to be playing in the National League, along with a guy who’s going to go down as perhaps the greatest player of all time, instead of in the American League, where a great year still counts for something.

In the National League, great just gets you on the ballot. To win, you’ve got to go beyond great and into immortal.

You can’t compete with a .609 on-base average and a slugging percentage better than .800. You can’t argue with 45 home runs and just 41 Ks in fewer than 400 official at-bats. You can’t compete with the mighty Bonds, not when he plays for a team that wasn’t picked to win anything and got to the final few games of the season, simply because of him.

All you can do is tip your hat to him and wait for the day he retires, so you can have a chance, too.

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