Trout hit .315 with 29 homers, 100 runs batted in and 30 steals and led the majors in runs (123), walks (116) and on-base percentage (.441) while playing standout defense in center. Boston Red Sox right fielder Mookie Betts finished second, with nine first-place votes. He excelled in all parts of the game, but Trout was judged to be better.

Betts’s team won the A.L. East, too, yet Trout beat him easily. Maybe, after this vote, we can bury the notion that an M.V.P. must come from a contender. It is long past time.

The criteria for the award state explicitly that “the M.V.P. need not come from a division winner or other playoff qualifier.” Yet the impulse for voters has almost always been to emphasize the word “valuable” by dreaming up hypothetical scenarios.

We often hear logic like this: “If you take Player X off that team, they don’t make the playoffs.” But who, exactly, is removing Player X from that team? Let’s consider what did happen, not what might have happened in an alternate reality.

Let’s also respect the fact that the best players play hard every day, no matter the standings. It seems insulting to their effort to suggest that excelling for a good team is somehow more important than excelling for a bad team. If you bought a ticket for an Angels game last season, Trout gave you his best every day, long after his team was finished. That should matter.

“Your approach can’t change; my approach doesn’t,” Trout said. “It’s not a good feeling when you’re out of it in September and you’re just going out there to play. We’re going out there to win games; it doesn’t matter if we’re in it or not. Obviously, you want to be in it, but I can’t say that I’m going to play differently when we’re losing. I want to win every day.”