Nelson Cruz for MVP now!

This is quite knowingly a hot take on something that has not yet come to pass and may not ever happen. Nonetheless, you can sense its possibility, almost smell it as when a strong wind blows over the landfill.

On Tuesday night, outfielder/designated hitter Nelson Cruz of the Baltimore Orioles hit his 21^st home run of the season. He leads the American League in home runs, RBI, and OPS, and is hitting .313/.384/.678. He’s on a pace for 61 home runs, and 159 RBI. These are normally numbers that put a player in the picture for Most Valuable Player hardware.

Call it a sadistic urge, but I very much want Nelson Cruz to be the best hitter in the American League. Weak defensive range means best player is an unlikely stretch, and since this isn’t 1996 and we might, just might have evolved past the point of giving the Juan Gonzalez types of the world important hardware makes it unlikely Cruz would win, and there are better choices even now, but that he would have to be considered is delicious to contemplate. I want to cause the skirt-clutching old schoolmarms, those Depends-wearing elder pedants in the Baseball Writers Association of America so much cognitive dissonance it feels like an elongated eel, its path through the granite of their ossified thoughts lubricated by sloughed-off mucus secretions, is sluicing through their minds.

It’s the only possible way some oxygen might penetrate those closed-off spaces that seem to have equated the complex art of striking a baseball with the 1960s East German women’s track and field doping program. It’s been 50 years, lads. Time to let such simplistic notions go. Feel the Eel of Ratiocination. Let it liberate you from an errant morality with gelatinous secretions of reason.

Cruz won’t win the MVP award even if he spends the rest of the season washing the feet of the poor and helicopter-rescuing doomed polar bears from evaporating ice-floes because he wears the Biogenesis scarlet B, but oh, how I want him to deserve it. It would be akin to watching the Catholic Church struggle with the theories of Galileo, supposedly learned people grappling with things they don’t understand. The scolds have spent years now telling us the late 1990s and 2000s didn’t happen the way we thought they did. For this they have no proof but the uninformed supposition that chemicals equal hitting, an inference based on hearsay and predicated on the unscientific notion that the same drugs that did nothing for the dozens of scrub players who have been caught but had a selective Superman effect on Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Mark McGwire.

Yes, whatever those sluggers imbibed or injected made their heads bigger and their bodies swell. Anyone can see that, just as many cancer patients can tell you that their drugs might have caused them to puke regularly and lose their hair but did not a thing to shrink their tumors, just as any sufferer from clinical depression can tell you that Paxil may or may not moderate his mood but the gaining of 20 pounds is pretty much guaranteed.

Well, they’ll say, we can’t prove the effect, but the sin is one of commission. “Their intent was to cheat,” they’ll say, “even if in actuality they didn’t achieve much that we can separate from the generally inflationary characteristics of the era.” If so, they weren’t very smart about it, going about it indirectly. Their actions were about getting bigger, as a narcissistic bodybuilding culture that didn’t exist in baseball prior to the late 1980s took hold, succubus-like, on the minds of impressionable twentysomethings. Getting bigger is several steps removed from being a good hitter, else the Astros could simply draft the world bodybuilding champion this week, plug him into the cleanup spot, and be done with it.

Then there’s the cast of slobs who aided and abetted them. At least BALCO had a guy with an undergraduate degree in chemistry on staff. A bachelors in chemistry would normally qualify you to do little more than wash test tubes and do simple experiments in any lab in the country, but Patrick Arnold was precocious. Yet, what he invented were primarily anabolic steroids. These are about building strength, which is not necessarily the same as improving hitting. Even if one could prove a direct correlation between home-run hitting and having a literally swollen head, consider the matter of degree. When Ben Johnson took the gold medal in the 100-meter race at the 1988 Olympics on stanozolol, he cut his own record from 9.83 seconds to 9.79 seconds. If the effect on so simple an athletic activity as running in a straight line for a fraction of a minute is so limited, it’s hard to believe that players who would normally be bunting for singles would take a few shots and commence hitting balls over buildings.

Biogenesis seems to have been a step down the quality ladder from BALCO. When you saw Tony Bosch on “60 Minutes,” did he look like a convincing mad scientist to you? I’ve written this several times now, but players like Cruz and Alex Rodriguez, whatever their virtues as players, must be fantastically stupid people. With the sheer amount of money at their disposal they could have endowed a biochemistry lab at any university in the country and put teeming hordes of professors and graduate students to work on a Super Soldier Serum so effective it would make Captain America incontinent with envy.

One of the privileges of wealth is the ability to buy expertise. If a pipe bursts, you call a plumber. If your cable goes, you call the cable guy. If you find yourself running a 103-degree fever and sprouting pustules, do you go to your family doctor, the emergency room, or the strangely anonymous storefront next to the nail salon at the strip mall? If you did, what kind of results would you expect to get? A 50-year-old male who suddenly experiences problems emptying his bladder does not walk into Wal-Mart and ask the elderly greeter to shove an unlubricated finger up his ass and see how his prostate is doing.

In the former case, congratulations -- you’re going to die of the Bubonic Plague. The latter is spectacularly unlikely to result in anything aside from embarrassment, arrest, and possibly a perforated rectum. Similarly, the course pursued by the juicers, particularly the Biogenesis juicers, was unlikely to pay off. Lex Luthor is not skulking about in secret labs throughout the country with Secret Babe Ruth in a Can because that’s not how baseball works. The players were credulous. We don’t have to be that naive.

In short, I don’t believe, in a practical sense, Nelson Cruz was on anything. I don’t believe he’s on anything now. Even if it’s revealed later he daily swallows an entire Walgreens, he’s not on anything. The Writers look within souls and characterize motives of which they have no knowledge. They play the part of biochemists, and they know even less about that than Tony Bosch. How many journalism programs require a concentration in vitamins and supplements?

So, with fervent wishes that he keeps it up, Nelson Cruz for MVP -- not because he’s a paragon of virtue, but because he can bloody hit, because being stupid isn’t necessarily a crime, and because the hand-wringing on the part of the self-appointed guardians of the game at the point of any possible candidacy will have the paradoxical effect of revealing that though Cruz may lack integrity, his detractors possess even less. That Cruz has been a better player off of drugs than on is not an irony, but evidence of the snake-oil nature of the whole supplement/steroid business. Forgive me for concluding with the hackneyed phrase “if the season ended today,” but I almost wish it would so Cruz doesn’t have the opportunity to cool off. This is the one Inquisition we don’t want to avoid.