Here at Sky Is Falling Inc., we spent last week debating whether the baseball season might end, which brought us quite immediately to the question of the American League's Most Valuable Player Award, which we might as well come to an agreement on, anyway, seeing as we're already here and all.

And the winner is ... well, it's not A-Rod, which is really the only thing we've been called together to discuss. Class dismissed.

	Alex Rodriguez leads the majors in home runs (48) and RBI (121).

It's amazing that Alex Rodriguez finds as much controversy as he does. This is a wonderful player, a solid teammate, a man never in trouble with the law, whose greatest sporting sin to date has been saying that he wanted to play for a winner and then leaving the Seattle Mariners for the dead-dog Texas Rangers (and so much gold it wouldn't all fit into that pot at the end of the rainbow).

Still, there you go. And there goes Rodriguez, right smack into another series of blood-on-the-moon bar arguments in which his name is either exalted or repeatedly taken in vain. Call it a luxury tax on excellence.

Rodriguez's overall excellence just isn't in question, not even remotely. You don't need me to remind you of that. The very fact that people can raise the prospect of a Rodriguez Triple Crown threat without having someone offer to pay for their brain scan attests to the kind of year the man is having in Texas.

But, look, it's Texas. It is a last-place team whose overall ineptitude even Rodriguez's great play cannot begin to address. And that's pretty much where we draw the line.

There are no MVP's on last-place teams. It's a contradiction in terms. There are great players on bad teams in every professional sport; there are players who probably keep truly hideous teams from actually finishing in last place. You can make the case that Rodriguez is as important to the 58-72 Rangers as any player is to any single team in baseball, and he's so good that very few people would attempt to knock it down.

But with all due respect, it ain't the same. Show me the player who is making the greatest difference on a team that is going from fair to good or good to great, and I will show you a better MVP candidate than Rodriguez.

Want names? OK, strictly for the sake of the argument: Torii Hunter in Minnesota, whose numbers don't compare to Rodriguez, but who is consistently identified as the soul of a Twins team that has come from oblivion to runaway divisional success in two years. Miguel Tejada in Oakland, who simply carried his team's offensive production on his back after Jason Giambi signed with New York. Garret Anderson in Anaheim, re-cast as a power hitter and smack in the middle of the Angels' great surge. Giambi.

They're all fine players, though no single one of them could be favorably compared with Rodriguez. But the MVP has long suffered from an identity crisis, with voters understandably baffled by the criteria. If the honor simply goes to the best player in the league, why isn't it the Best Player Award?

Why, indeed. This is the MVP. And while value is a deservedly subjective category, you'll never convince me that the most valuable player in any league is a player on a team that is finishing in last place with or without him.*

Cold? You bet. That's why they only give away one each year.

The counter-arguments here go in predictable, but effective directions: (1) A rote recitation of Rodriguez's statistics in comparison to great shortstops in baseball history; and (2) The notion that if A-Rod were piling up exactly these same numbers in service of a division leader or a wild-card contender, he'd be the runaway MVP choice.

That second contention, of course, strikes a popular nerve -- and what of it? Isn't that what being a league MVP is significantly about, a player's ability to take a good team and by his own work elevate it to playoff level?*

I've never understood the backlash against good players on winning teams, a kind of popular blowback for one's having the audacity to be part of an organization that doesn't stink. Can we really devalue Ichiro's excellence because the Mariners were winners before he came along? On that basis alone, whole rafts of Yankees -- Alfonso Soriano, Bernie Williams, Giambi -- are just wholesale ignored.

For every question that can be raised about a good player on a winner (isn't Soriano helped by the fact that pitchers are already worried about Derek Jeter on deck?), there's an equal question with someone like Rodriguez. None of them amount to a warm bucket of spit, of course. Rodriguez undoubtedly is getting more pitches to hit this month than he would if the Rangers were engaged in the lid-tight race in the AL West, but what's the point, that he wouldn't be a top-shelf player if he weren't? It's too ludicrous to discuss.

Rodriguez gets slapped around here for no good reason, although it was his choice to leave the Mariners for the Rangers. He could have stayed and been part of a consistent winner in Seattle, and the truth is that his MVP status would absolutely be enhanced by playing for a front-runner. That's life.

(It doesn't make Rodriguez the poster-child for what's wrong with the game, by the way. The poster-child for what's wrong with the game is Tom Hicks, the Texas owner, who committed that $252 million to A-Rod and millions more to the likes of Chan Ho Park and Carl Everett, then began complaining that the game's financial structure was out of whack. Rodriguez? He signed the deal of a lifetime to play ball. It's no crime.)*

Still, you're likely to hear it aruged that Rodriguez's Triple Crown threat of a season should be rewarded by the American League MVP. In truth, the chance for a Triple Crown chase is the reward, because it comes along so rarely in the game's annals. They give out an MVP in each league every year. For Rodriguez, maybe next year.

Mark Kreidler is a columnist with the Sacramento Bee and a regular contributor to ESPN.com