By this point in a season, nothing is easier to predict than a race for the Most Valuable Player award, which goes not to the best player but to the best player who fulfills a variety of arbitrary criteria. Once you admit that the award is what it actually is, rather than what you think it should be, everything falls right into line.

To see how this works, just look at the American League this year. It looks at first to be a race, since no one in the league is having such a great season that they’ll win by acclamation, and you can make a case for nearly a dozen players. The only ones in real contention, though, are Chicago’s Carlos Quentin, who ranks fourth in the league in OPS, and Minnesota’s Justin Morneau, a former MVP and touted RBI man, with Texas’s Josh Hamilton and Los Angeles’s Francisco Rodriguez just barely in there. No one else has a prayer.

Right off, you can eliminate Mariano Rivera, Cleveland’s Cliff Lee, and Toronto’s Roy Halladay, as they all violate the first criteria, which is to not be a pitcher. No American League pitcher has won an MVP award since Dennis Eckersley in 1992. Rodriguez has a slight chance; he’ll set a new record for saves this year and plays for the best team in the league — one without any other obvious candidates. He’s still a pitcher, though, and few people take saves seriously. He’ll need a miracle to win.

Going by recent voting, it’s easy to eliminate most of the rest of the field. Of the last 10 AL MVPs, nine have played for playoff teams. That eliminates Cleveland center fielder Grady Sizemore, who’s hit as well relative to his position as anyone in the league and is the only excellent defender among the serious candidates. It will also probably eliminate Hamilton, who already has 112 runs batted in, and his teammates Milton Bradley, a designated hitter with a good shot at leading the league in batting, on-base average, and slugging average, and Ian Kinsler, a second baseman who leads the league in hits and runs. Finally, this will likely knock out Alex Rodriguez, who’s basically ineligible anyway, despite being arguably the best player in the league this year; while he’s better than anyone else, he’s not much better than he usually is.

Sizemore, Bradley, Kinsler, and Rodriguez can also all be more or less crossed off the list because they don’t rate with the leaders in RBI; in eight of the last 10 years, the MVP has gone to someone in the top four. This will probably knock out Hamilton, too, as the actual leader has only won twice; all else being equal, you want to finish between second and fourth in this statistic if you want a big plaque with Kenesaw Mountain Landis’s face on it.

None of these players save Rodriguez would have much of a chance anyway; as seven of the last 10 MVPs have played in tight pennant races and another two for teams that blew out the competition. This could change if the Rangers get into the wild card race in a serious way, in which case Hamilton would have a good chance. But that doesn’t seem very likely.

Finally, you can add another strike against all three Rangers and Sizemore for not playing a corner position. It’s been possible for someone at an up-the-middle position to win the AL MVP over the last decade — two shortstops and a catcher have done it — but no one this year is having the kind of year it usually takes to offset a crippling RBI deficiency.

One might wonder at this point about the vaunted great stretch run as an MVP criterion, but it doesn’t apply as much as you’d think. In the last decade, Vladimir Guerrero, Jason Giambi, and Juan Gonzalez have all won with monstrous, season-defining stretch runs, but most often players do nothing special in September relative to what they’ve done the rest of the year. Quiet stretch drives such as Morneau’s in 2006 or Ichiro Suzuki’s in 2001 are more common than anyone doing what Gonzalez did in 1998, when he secured his second award by hitting like Lou Gehrig for the last two months.

All of this leaves us with Morneau and Quentin, who rank second and third in the league in RBI and play corner positions indifferently for two teams locked in a tight playoff race. There are better hitters; there are better hitters at more difficult positions; there are better hitters at more difficult positions for teams in pennant races. There are, in other words, better players. What any of that has to do with the actual MVP award — which might as well be engraved with the name of whichever one of these two plays for the team that ends up winning the American League Central — is a mystery.

tmarchman@nysun.com