Name the player who was traded twice within a year and then only two seasons later, in his first full season in the majors, won the Triple Crown and the Most Valuable Player award.

Give up? You should. This is a trick question. The player doesn’t exist.

Yet he could. A home run spurt in the final three weeks of the season could put Carlos Gonzalez in position to win the National League home run title and help him finish first in runs batted in as well as lead the league in hitting.

And all of that could help the Colorado Rockies complete their third late-season surge into the playoffs in the last four years. That achievement, in turn, would enhance Gonzalez’s m.v.p. chances in a four-way competition with Albert Pujols, Joey Votto and Adrian Gonzalez.

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When the subject is the wild card, two thoughts come to mind: how Bud Selig gets/takes credit for its creation and how the president was the only owner who objected to it.

George Bush, of course, wasn’t the president yet; otherwise he wouldn’t have been the owner of the Texas Rangers and in position to object to the creation of the wild card. He didn’t necessarily object to the wild card itself, but he opposed the change to three divisions in each league, which was tantamount to opposing the wild card.

Under the proposed three-division format, the Rangers would have been placed in the American League West and would have been two time zones from the division’s other teams. Bush believed that difference would have had too severe an economic impact on the Rangers’ television and radio advertising revenue.

Eventually, Selig convinced Bush that the new format was necessary and good for baseball.

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This column is dedicated to A. J. Burnett because he is responsible for it. More precisely, his won-lost record gave me the idea for it. The idea centers on a question: how can a starting pitcher on a winning team have a losing record?

Burnett, whom the Yankees lured to New York with an $82.5 million contract for the 2009 season, has a losing record, 10 wins and 12 losses. With four weeks left in the season, he has been the losing pitcher in 24 percent of the 50 losses the Yankees have.

By comparison CC Sabathia has been the losing pitcher in 10 percent of the team’s losses. Sabathia has also been the winning pitcher in 22 percent of the Yankees’ victories while Burnett has received credit for 11.6 percent.

I asked Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager, how Burnett could have a losing record with a team as good as the Yankees have been.

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