You really do run out of ways to describe the achievements of Barry Bonds after a while. The space of this column could be filled several times over with ridiculous, scarcely believable indicators of how good he has been for the last few years. I won’t do that, but consider a few bits of trivia about his 2004 season:

* The difference between Bonds’s on base average of .602 and NL MVP runner-up Adrian Beltre’s .388 is greater than the difference between Beltre’s OBA and the .270 mark posted by Florida’s Alex Gonzalez, which was the worst in the majors among batting qualifiers.

* Bonds’s slugging average of .812 was higher than the on-base-plus-slugging marks of, among others, Alfonso Soriano and Mike Piazza. It wasn’t far off Derek Jeter’s .823 OPS, either.

* Bonds had more times on base (376) than he did official at-bats (373).

* According to Runs Created Per 27 Outs, a Bill James statistic measuring how many runs a team would score per game if all nine lineup spots were taken by one player, an all-Bonds team would score 20.21 runs per game. That’s more than Jeter (5.73), Alex Rodriguez (6.88), and Gary Sheffield (7.26) – combined.

Would you rather have Bonds than the top third of the Yankee lineup? Of course not. But this last factoid indicates something about Bonds – his performance is, literally, outside the ability of statistics to capture.

Anyone who tells you they can measure precisely the effect or value of his 120 intentional walks – which would account both for the cost to the Giants’ offense of taking the bat out of his hands and the cost to the opposition of giving up the outs he would have made in those at-bats – is a fool or a liar. By their nature, evaluative systems become less accurate the farther what they are measuring is from the center, and Bonds is so far from the center of baseball performance that he might as well be playing a different game.

What we do know is that the Giants, who, aside from Bonds are no better than the Mets, missed the playoffs by one game this year and scored only five fewer runs than the Cardinals despite playing in a good pitcher’s park. Think about that for a moment: Replace Cliff Floyd with Bonds and the Mets would be a 90-win team. That’s value.

Nonetheless, the vote announced yesterday wasn’t unanimous, which is interesting because Bonds was so obviously the best and most valuable player in the National League by any possible standard. Beltre received six first place votes, and Albert Pujols and Scott Rolen one apiece. You have to admire the stubborn refusal of the writers who voted for these other players to bow before Bonds’s greatness. It hearkens back to a grand tradition, which was at one time explicit and later became merely an unwritten rule, against awarding the MVP to the same man too often.

Bonds has deserved every one of the seven MVP awards he’s won. He has even deserved awards he didn’t win; had things played out slightly differently, this would be his ninth award. Had he not been robbed in 1991, when Terry Pendleton was inexplicably awarded the NL MVP, this would mark the second time he’d won four MVPs in a row. Had he not been robbed in 2000, when his teammate Jeff Kent took home the award, this would be his fifth in a row.

While many of Bonds’s achievements are unprecedented, the achievement of being the best player in the league this consistently is not. By my reckoning, Willie Mays was indisputably the most valuable player in the league 11 times; the same was true of Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, and Stan Musial nine times, and of Babe Ruth seven times. (This of course doesn’t take the military service of Mays, Williams, and Musial into account.) Musial and Mantle won three MVPs each, Mays and Williams two, and Ruth none after 1923.

Bonds is probably the best player who’s ever lived. But does he deserve as many MVP awards as Mantle, Mays, and Williams combined?

The answer is, of course, conditional. In a literal sense, he deserves more than he has won, and the only problem is that his predecessors were insufficiently honored, denied their just appreciation by a common belief that there was something wrong with giving the award to the same player every year.

When writers refused to award the MVP to Mays or Mantle or Musial year after year despite their being obviously the best player in the league, they were making two statements. The first was that the accolades should be spread around a bit, and I would suspect that anyone who voted for Beltre or Pujols was motivated by the same belief. This is slightly ridiculous – it isn’t the “Most Valuable Player Who Isn’t The Best In The League Every Year” award.

In the longer view, though, the unwritten rule against awarding anyone, no matter how deserving, more than three MVP awards arose in large part from a belief that greatness speaks for itself and that an award need not point out what is self-evidently true. Mays won only two MVP awards – fewer than Roy Campanella – not because anyone was unaware that he was the best in the National League every year, but because the award was in some ways unworthy of him. He was so revered that to actually vote him the award was unnecessary: What would have been proved by it?

It is a measure of Bonds’s greatness that he has overcome this decades-old tradition. It is also, a bit perversely, a measure of how little respect there is for his greatness that it is pointed to at every opportunity, as if the world would otherwise miss it.

Bonds exemplifies athletic excellence, consistency, and the spirit of winning play every bit as much as Mays, Musial, or Mantle, but he has never meant quite what they meant, either to the game or to his times. Given the history of the MVP award, Bonds’s seventh honor is a fitting indictment of a game that has been so busy denigrating him for nearly 20 years that it has yet to absorb what he has done.

This is exactly what happened to the man who was, before Bonds, the greatest hitter to ever live. Like Ted Williams, Bonds has spent so much of his career as the object of absurd assaults on his character and his skill that his achievements, despite all the accolades, have been neglected and obscured. We can only hope that once enough time has passed, Bonds will take Williams’s place as an icon of American individualism and relentlessness; it’s a legacy worthy of him.