Now that the Oakland Athletics are the talk of baseball, we are confronted with the predictable bleatings about postseason awards.

Never mind that the A's, even with 19 consecutive wins under the mattress, still haven't guaranteed themselves any kind of postseason. It's never too early, in baseball anyway, to blow your horn loud enough to drown out anyone else's horn.

	Miguel Tejada may not win the AL MVP award, but he is the most valuable player on the best team in baseball right now.

And yet, even with the A's as the prettiest team on the south side of Bud Selig's They Can Never Win list, there is perfectly good reason to see how they could go completely awardless when the voting is finally done.

The A's, for their part, are by winning their game each day declaring that shortstop Miguel Tejada is the one true Most Valuable Player ... that Barry Zito must surely be the Cy Young Award winner ... and that the translucent Art Howe must finally be declared the American League manager of the year.

But in fact, there are perfectly good reasons not to get your hopes up for any of them, if in fact your hopes run that way.

We need not produce their own accomplishments here. Suffice it to say that they are more than merely worthy candidates.

But Tejada, for all his good works on behalf of the Elephant, most notably his two walk-off hits Sunday and Monday to protect the 19-game winning streak, is still no more important to his team than Torii Hunter is to his, or Alfonso Soriano or Jason Giambi are to theirs. Oakland fans can't see this, any more than New York fans or Minnesota fans can.

And in the middle, there sits Alex Rodriguez, whose superior work in the field and at the plate is still not enough to Air-Wick the Texas Rangers.

You see, this has all the earmarks of the 1987 NL MVP vote, in which none of the contenders had a standout figure while the last place Chicago Cubs had Andre Dawson, the player with the overwhelming statistics. Dawson won, swept in on the "Got No Better Idea'' ticket.

As for Zito, well, the one obstacle to his coronation is the same one it always is -- Pedro Martinez. The frightening but fragile Red Sox ace is the favorite going into every season, and is well-night unbeatable when he goes. In truth, he is more valuable to the Red Sox than of the MVP candidates are to their teams, even though he has some cover in Derek Lowe.

But Zito is just as difficult to solve as Martinez, and Zito hasn't missed a start. He has more cover than Martinez, though, in that Mark Mulder, Tim Hudson and the recently resuscitated Cory Lidle give Oakland the deepest starting staff since the Orioles of the last '60s and early '70s.

Votes, in other words, will be split.

Which leads us to Howe, whose fate has already been decided. Second place, again.

This time, he will lose to Minnesota's Ron Gardenhire, who took a modest team and found the required ways to let them excel. Last year, he lost to Lou Piniella, whose Seattle Mariners went something like 155-7. The year before that, he got Gardenhired by Chicago's Jerry Manuel. And the year before that, Boston's Jimy Williams.

Clearly, this is a man doomed to be Miss Congeniality.

Given the laws of the Manager of the Year award, his best chance was 1998, the year Williams beat him. His team was given no chance, and he helped make them contenders, which is always the blueprint to the award.

Since then, Howe has eliminated himself as the A's have improved. He has gone from 65 to 74 to 87 to 91 to 102 wins, and assuming as we must that they lost their last game of the regular season back in mid-August, 112. His pitching staff is the envy of anyone capable of envy, and his general manager, Billy Beane, is always first in line at the praise trough.

So Howe must make himself content with being the guy who gets the girl who is the best friend of the girl the hero gets, just as Zito must prove to voters that he is more Pedro Martinez than Pedro Martinez, and just as Tejada must show voters that is more Soriano than Soriano, more Hunter than Hunter, more Giambi than Giambi, and close enough to Rodriguez to make Rodriguez irrelevant to the discussion.

Yes, they could all get shut out. But if you want to make that case, whisper it in Oakland. Nobody there is listening to alternative theories any more.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com