Last week in this space I somewhat off-handedly predicted that Philadaelphia’s Ryan Howard would hit 62 home runs for an 80-win team and win the National League’s MVP award. I ought to play the stock market, or at least join in on a few games of c-lo.

It certainly took no genius to note last week that Howard had an outside shot at hitting more home runs than Babe Ruth or Roger Maris ever did in a season, but after his recent barrage — Howard hit three home runs against the Braves Sunday, and another against the Astros yesterday — he’s sitting on 53 and is on pace for 62 longballs. It will take a lot to do it, and the odds are still against him, but every day Howard is looking like a better bet to pass a mark only three men have ever passed before.

There, of course, is the problem — those three men are Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa, so whatever Howard does will not be viewed simply as the achievement of an extraordinarily talented young ballplayer, but, depending on your view, as anything from the wiping of their names from the record book to confirmation that even if those three were using performance enhancers, it didn’t matter.

Another way of putting it is that we’re cynical now, so that before we celebrate the achievement, we have to scrutinize it and see if it’s legitimate.

Howard doesn’t look like a freak out of the pages of a bodybuilding magazine, certainly, but that doesn’t mean much. He is subject to the same drug testing anyone else is, and he hasn’t failed, but there’s a reason those tests are said to be, more than anything else, IQ tests. The only real answer is that no one knows if Howard is clean.

I don’t say this to impugn him, just to interject a note of caution as people prepare to be triumphal should he pass Maris. There were many euphoric and glowing testimonies to the spirit of McGwire and Sosa written eight years ago that seem in retrospect incredibly foolish and naïve. The lesson the intervening years should have taught us isn’t that all ballplayers are on steroids, but rather that we should presume we know a lot less, one way or the other, than we think we do about these matters.

The fairest thing to do is to say that Howard hasn’t failed a test and should thus be presumed clean, and also to say that merely not failing a test is no reason to trumpet a player’s integrity. If this kind of painfully ambivalent conclusion is the best we can do, it’s at least better than we could do in a world without testing.

At the least, there’s nothing particularly out of character about Howard’s hitting. Two years ago, he hit 46 home runs in 131 minor league games; last year, he hit 16 home runs in a third of a season with the Phillies. Given that at 26 he’s still improving, his massive power onslaught is just part of his natural development. Baseball Prospectus’s conservative Pecota projection system, for instance, predicted before the season that he’d hit 37 home runs and gave him a 10% chance of hitting 61. Albert Pujols, by contrast, was predicted to hit 39 home runs, with a 10% chance of hitting 47.

The system saw the same thing that scouts have always seen: that Howard was at some risk of flaming out in the majors, but that he also had a ceiling as high as that of any power hitter in the game. The combination of physical size, aggressiveness in the strike zone, and a high batting average despite high strikeout totals, together with the raw power, always projected extremely well for his future.

This is to say that this isn’t a fluke, anymore than Derek Jeter’s batting average is. Howard is a 45-home run hitter at the top of his range, just as Jeter is a .320 hitter at the top of his. There’s nothing noteworthy about Howard going from 16 to 61; had he played all last year in the majors, he almost certainly would have hit more than 40 home runs.

The last bit of doubt surrounding Howard comes from his home park, which has a reputation as a bandbox. It is a bandbox, but it hasn’t particularly affected Howard, who’s hit .308 with 27 home runs in 253 at-bats at home, and .308 with 25 home runs in 247 at-bats on the road. Playing in a homer-friendly park affects the value of his performance — a run in Philly isn’t as valuable as a run elsewhere, because they’re easier to come by — but there’s no reason to think he’s benefiting especially from playing there. He doesn’t hit cheap home runs, at home or abroad.

Putting it all together, there’s nothing about Howard’s startling performance that should really raise any suspicions of any sort at all. After what we’ve seen in baseball, it would be silly to simply brand it legitimate, and clean as Howard might be, he’s not going to be the “real” record holder or anything of the sort even if he does pass Maris. The single-season home run record is held by Barry Bonds, and Howard isn’t getting it. There’s no grand lesson to be learned here; a hellaciously talented young player is having an awesome season because he’s a great hitter getting his first chance to play every day in the majors. Nothing more, and nothing else.