Barry Bonds won his record seventh MVP award today garnering 24 of the 32 first place votes. That's not the amazing part. The amazing part is that not only did eight dolts not put Bonds first but one even had him third on the ballot. Then again, these are baseball writers after all. Hey, after a correct, unanimous selection of Johan Santana in the AL Cy Young, I won't be surprised if David Ortiz gets the AL MVP as a means of compensation.

But back to Bonds: Not only does he have four more MVPs than the next guy, those "next guys" are Joe DiMaggio, Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Mantle, Mike Schmidt, Roy Campanella, Stan Musial, and Yogi Berra. Bonds simply has dominated MVP voting like no other player ever has.

Here are the top vote getters in the Bonds era (1986 to 2004):

But Bonds has been on the ballot in "just" fifteen of the nineteen seasons in his career. Here are the men who have been 15 MVP ballots:

Here are the players all time who received the highest percentage of first place votes available:

And the ones with the highest percentage of the maximum points available:

However, remember that these numbers reflect just those seasons in which the players received MVP votes. Ken Caminiti played 15 major-league seasons, but received MVP votes in just one, 1996, the year he won the NL award. Even though Bonds has won 7 MVP awards and has appeared on 15 ballots but had four seasons in which he received no votes. They were his first four, 1986-89.

So, here are the players that made the MVP ballot the highest percentage of times in their career (Given that there was an MVP vote in the league in the given year). (Also keep in mind that there had been rules in the past that voters could not pick more than one player per team and that previous winners were ineligible.)

Dontrelle Willis, Miguel Cabrera, Jeff Bagwell, and Mike Piazza just fell off the list by not receiving votes this year.

Now, here are the only players who received at least 25% of the maximum vote possible during their entire careers:

By the way, Piazza dropped off the list after the 2004 ballot.

So it's Pujols and Bonds and nada mas. They're the only two over 50%. Bonds has done it remarkably over a 19-year career. It's too early to compare Pujols with him, but he has been more successful in his first four years than Bonds was, so that's an encouraging sign for him.

I cannot run an all-time comparison for first-place votes because the data are not available for many early elections. I will endeavor to resolve that deductively from the data available though.

The final result is an even more stunning picture of Bonds as a player. I think that he has been the most dominant MVP candidate in the award's history. I guess that's no real stretch when the man's won seven trophies, but I'm daring enough to proclaim it.