So you want to win the MVP award, huh? I hope you play in the National League. There’s a bit more of an open field over there, at least. Sure, the NL feaures Kris Bryant and the only starting pitcher in the game who can seriously demand consideration for the award. But if you play in the American League, you have to deal with one Michael Nelson Trout, who is far and away the best player in the game. And, given the conditioning and training of today’s athletes relative to those from previous generations, Trout may just be the best to ever play. If you want to win the MVP in the AL, you’ll probably have to go through him.

It’s been done before. In fact, it’s happened more often than not. Trout has played five full seasons, and he’s won the MVP twice. Of course, the times he didn’t win, he finished second. It would be a surprise if he didn’t finish among the top two again this year. History dictates that Mike Trout’s default state is “MVP Contender.” The times he’s lost the award, twice to Miguel Cabrera and once to Josh Donaldson, have been close. Miggy and Donaldson never blew him away. They were tight margins. He theoretically deserves to have won the award five times.

What would it take for someone to be the absolute clear favorite over Trout? What could a player possibly do to overtake Trout and emerge as the consensus favorite? In the same vein, what would Trout have to not do?

Let’s get to those questions in a moment. First, a note: when we say MVP here, we don’t mean “best player in the league.” We’re talking about the actual BBWAA-awarded MVP title, and all the voting idiosyncrasies that come with it. That means we’re accounting for the belief, held by some voters, that the winner of the award must belong to a contending team. So that will be factored into our calculus. At the same time, it’s worth noting that Trout received 19 of the 30 first-place votes while playing for the sub-.500 Angels, anyway. Those 30 voters seemed more open to awarding a player from a non-contender, but we’ll have a different group voting for that award this year.

And for that matter, the 2017 Angels project to be a better team. Trout is going to have a better group around him, which means a potential run to the Wild Card may be on the horizon. How can a playoff-bound Trout, with a typical Troutian season, not win the MVP? The easy answer would be for Trout to miss a month or two with injury, of course. This would eat at his counting stats and subtract from his overall value. But that’s boring, and frankly, the more Trout, the better.

So let’s go another route. Let’s see just how crazy someone would have to go to easily walk past Trout in the MVP race. Not just beat him out for the award, since that’s been done, but to blow Trout out of the water.

Mookie Betts came in second last year. He had a phenomenal season, putting up 7.8 WAR by hitting the snot out of the ball, playing a really good right field, and stealing 26 bags. He did everything. Trout still eclipsed him by more than a win and a half.

So let’s start with Betts’s 2016 season as a baseline and see what else he’d have to do in order to overcome Trout. This is already quite an assumption to make: our projections forecast some regression for Betts. But surpassing Trout will require some unreasonable assumptions.

With regard to Betts, we know he fell about 1.5 wins short of Trout last year. So let’s say that, for him to comfortably win the MVP, he’d need to beat Trout by 1.5 wins. Obviously, voters in the BBWAA aren’t merely sorting by WAR and choosing a winner. But a 1.5-win lead should make Betts’s case clear. To account for the additional three wins, Betts would need to produce 30 extra runs. To create that kind of value would require Betts to record an additional 15 homers. Or 45 walks. Or 150 stolen bases (without any caught stealings). Or some combination therein. For Donaldson and Jose Altuve and their AL counterparts, the demands would only be greater.

So that might be difficult. But since we’re already diving headfirst into flights of fancy, let’s get even crazier. Let’s talk about Gary Sanchez. He accumulated 3.2 WAR in just 53 games last year by hitting 20 home runs and throwing out a bunch of runners, among other things. You may have heard about it.

What would a full season ofGary Sanchez look like? Well, if you prorate his offensive numbers out to a full season’s worth of work at 145 games (which you should never, ever do in serious analysis, for all you kids at home), you come up with something like 9.0 WAR. You also get54.7 home runs. Let’s round that up to 55. There hasn’t been a single 50-homer season by a catcher since at least 1950. The historic implications of that feat, however unlikely, might be sufficient to catch the eyes of the voters.

Asking for 145 games from a catcher is a lot, but the Yankees tended to stick him at DH on his days off from crouching behind the plate. Only 36 of those 53 games were as the catcher. Using that ratio, we come up with roughly 99 games as the catcher over those 145 games. That feels low, so using our same magical arbitrary math, we can shove him there for 110 games. Using his 2016 stats, we can prorate his caught-stealing rate out to about 40 runners thrown out over 110 games. Catchers have only thrown out that many runners 17 times since 2000.

Now the Yankees probably aren’t going to make the playoffs, but if we allow Sanchez to continue performing like a maniac, that may not matter very much for voters. In fact, Sanchez putting up those kinds of numbers might shove the Yankees into a Wild Card slot. It would be pretty hard to argue against that sort of showing for Sanchez. Would it be enough to easily surpass a normal Trout season? It’s hard to say.

The fact of the matter is that Mike Trout is performing like a top-10 all-time player right now. This is like trying to bet against Michael Jordan making the All-Star team. It happened, yeah. But Trout on a competent team is as close to a lock as it gets for the MVP award in March. Mookie Betts isn’t going to perform like Willie Mays, and Gary Sanchez isn’t actually Babe Ruth in catcher form. The voters have decided to give the award to someone else when they come close to or match Trout. It’s nearly impossible to create a realistic scenario, barring an injury, where someone blows him away.

It sure would be wild if that happened, though.