Jose Bautista is a strict constructionist. To Bautista, the slugging right fielder for the Toronto Blue Jays, voting for the Most Valuable Player award should not be open to interpretation.

“Whoever created the award created it for a reason, right?” Bautista said Saturday morning by his locker at Yankee Stadium. “When you create a type of award like that, you’ve got to define what it means and who can be considered. If you stick to what that says, that should be good enough.”

Here’s the bad news for Bautista. The very first lines of the letter sent to M.V.P. voters say this: “There is no clear-cut definition of what most valuable means. It is up to the individual voter to decide who was the most valuable player in each league to his team.”

The Baseball Writers’ Association of America has voted for the award since 1931, with two voters from each league city casting a ballot. The criteria have never changed.