The old villager in the balcony at the end of "Peyton Place" said it best: "Nothing should be unanimous."

	Barry Bonds may not be a favorite among teammates and media, but there's no question who the best player in the dugout is these days.

Well, something like that, anyway.

The point's the same, though. There should always be a little wiggle room for an argument, even if it's just a little.

But trying to find wiggle room in the Barry Bonds MVP Award is too difficult even for the cranky old goat at the end of the film. In his latest thumbing at the members of the sportswriting fraternity, Bonds sucked all the fun out of the National League MVP vote by getting every single first-place vote.

In fact, such was the depth and breadth of his year that the only surprise was that no voters had the wit to vote him first and second.

I mean, he not only was the best hitter in baseball, he was the best non-hitter in baseball, too. Nobody has ever watched 792 pitches go out of the strike zone before, so for him to still hit as he did when he was allowed the opportunity is a testimonial to the benefits of Rustoleum.

So for those of us who want to be able to argue someone else's case, if only for the aerobic exercise, we can only blame the rest of the National League. Hey, they all had so many more at-bats than Bonds, and give or take a hit here and there, they all decided to turn those extra at-bats into outs.

Now where's the fun in that?

The American League vote, on the other hand, was one of the most enjoyable ever, because there were so many candidates, and the best candidate of them all played on a team that, well, stunk on ice.

But the arguments for and against Alex Rodriguez, Miguel Tejada, Alfonso Soriano, Jason Giambi and Torii Hunter were all so fascinating, so delicious, that the MVP Award grew in stature because of the debate.

Bonds, on the other hand, was the '98 Yankees. He walked the equivalent of 49 games, missed another two weeks with an injury, and still beat the field so badly that nobody had the nerve not to vote for him.

If there is any disappointment for him in this, it is that nobody was able to show their small, spiteful side. He always has suspected that the media treat him with contempt, disdain, loathing and a side of onion rings, and a vote for the field here would have proved it for all eternity.

Instead, the Politburo-like voting pattern (100 percent of precincts reporting a 100 percent return for You-Know-Who) took that argument away from him as well.

It also is not the first time that the voters have put their petty complaints aside for the purity of the vote. Steve Carlton and Mike Schmidt were first-ballot Hall of Famers despite being slightly less popular than flu shots administered by cab drivers on a double shift. Indeed, spite has become a less powerful force when it comes to bestowing awards than it used to be. Even those who objected to Lawrence Taylor being voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame were essentially laughed out of the room by the metric tonnage of the evidence.

As has been mentioned here before, Bonds has run out of personal hurdles. There is the World Series ring, but that hardly can be made out as a personal failure any longer, even if it had validity before, which it didn't.

But he has made himself the perfect bronze-medal winner in the all-time-bestest-player-ever bake-off, behind Babe Ruth and Willie (The Godfather) Mays, and the arguments in that discussion are losing their steam as well. Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio ... all great players, all losing ground to the weight of Bonds' achievements, especially those of the past two years.

So Bonds gets another trophy. He grinds without noticeable interest through another conference call answering variations on the central question, "So, just how great are you really?" It's all self-explanatory by now. He got the award because he again had the equivalent of a season-and-a-half to everyone else's season, and only a moron would be unable to see it.

Looks like we're out of morons for one day, anyway.

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