A week ago I explored the reasons baseball writers so consistently voted for Mike Trout either for the most valuable player award or high up on the list of players considered for the award. Responses from 10 of the 24 writers who placed Trout first, second or third made it clear that writers were not voting for the most valuable player but for the best player. That was a change from the years when I was an M.V.P. voter.

One response in particular made that change clear. Jeff Fletcher of the Orange County (Calif.) Register wrote:

“In short, I believe ‘most valuable’ and ‘best’ are the same thing. That’s how it works if you’re discussing the value of anything else. I don’t know where the word ‘valuable’ got twisted into something else.

“If you think otherwise, then you must also believe Brock Holt is more valuable than Mike Trout too. Do you want to write that column?”

I don’t know how long Fletcher has been a baseball writer or how long or how often he has been an M.V.P. voter, but I can tell him the word valuable was not “twisted into something else.” It was prominent in relation to the award when I became a member of the Baseball Writers Association in 1962.

I don’t know what criteria voters used to make their decisions, but most, if not all, took the name of the award literally and voted, rightly or wrongly, for the player they thought was the most valuable, not the best. That doesn’t mean they (we) always got it right, but in retrospect it seems that the voting was more objective than it is today. There was no simple way of selecting the player, no modern metric like WAR, the baffling number that, unlike batting average, most writers can’t figure out for themselves but have to find it on a website and use it to determine the best player.

Was Kirk Gibson the best player in the National League in 1988? His statistics don’t bear that out, but he was voted most valuable player. The Troutskyites would probably disagree with that choice, but Gibson received 13 first-place votes and 272 points to 7 and 236 points for Darryl Strawberry and 4 and 162 points for Kevin McReynolds.

Gibson was the hero of the Dodgers’ road to and conquest of the World Series, but the voting was done before the post-season. During the season Gibson barely showed up among the offensive leaders.

He finished second in runs scored (106), fourth in on-base percentage (.377) and ninth in slugging percentage (.483). He hit 25 home runs, drove in 76 runs and batted .290. Those are more than respectable numbers, but they do not make someone the best player in the league.

Here, I think, are three better candidates for best player of that season:

• Strawberry, with a league-leading 39 home runs and .545 slugging percentage, a second-best 101 runs batted in and 101 runs scored, fourth most in the league.
• Will Clark, league-leader with 109 runs batted in and 100 walks; 102 runs scored for third; 29 homers tied for third; his .508 slugging percentage and .386 on-base percentage were each third and he was the only player in the league to play in all 162 games.
• Andres Galarraga, league-leading 184 hits and 42 doubles; second best .540 slugging percentage, 29 homers tied for third and .302 batting average fourth.

Was Mo Vaughn the best player in the strike-shortened 1995 season when he led the Red Sox to a division championship over the Yankees? The offensive numbers suggest otherwise, but Vaughn was named M.V.P. with 12 first-place votes and 308 points over Albert Belle (11 and 300) and Edgar Martinez (4 and 244).

Belle led the league with 50 home runs (to Vaughn’s 39) and a .690 slugging percentage (to Vaughn’s .575) and tied Vaughn for the league lead in runs batted in with 126. Martinez was most likely penalized in the M.V.P. voting because he was a designated hitter, and voters have never liked designated hitters. But he was the league batting champion with a .356 average (to Vaughn’s .300) and he had the league’s best on-base percentage (.479 to Vaughn’s .388). Martinez’s .628 slugging percentage also topped Vaughn’s.

I probably shouldn’t bring this up given my disdain for WAR, which didn’t exist in 1995, but in the interest of full disclosure I cite WAR ratings for 1995 from baseball-reference.com: Belle and Martinez each 7.0, Vaughn 4.3.

In other words, Vaughn was not the best player by any standard, but he was the M.V.P. so in that year, Mr. Fletcher, most valuable and best were not synonymous.

The 1996 M.V.P. contest was a wide-open affair, and the winner, Juan Gonzalez, for the first of two awards in a three-year period, was not necessarily the best player. That nod could have gone to Belle, Alex Rodriguez, Ken Griffey Jr. or Mark McGwire.

In the M.V.P. voting, Gonzalez edged Alex Rodriguez, 290 points to 287, on the basis of receiving one more first-place vote, 11 to 10. Belle received 2 first-place votes and 228 points, Griffey 4 and 188.

McGwire was a major player that season, too, but finished seventh in the voting with 100 points. He led the league in home runs (52), on-base percentage (.467) and slugging percentage (.730). The big first baseman did all of this power hitting before anyone knew his impressive production was chemically aided.

Rodriguez won the league batting title by hitting .358, a number that could be questioned by his later admission of steroid abuse.

En route to his M.V.P. award, Gonzalez drove in 144 runs, second in the league to Belle’s 148, and hit 47 homers, fifth most. However, there were too many other good players to proclaim Gonzalez the best, which no one is doing except perhaps the voters who see best in most valuable.

On the other hand, in retrospect, maybe we should give the 1996 M.V.P. award to the chemist.

Gonzalez always denied vehemently that he used performance-enhancing drugs, but strong circumstantial evidence says otherwise. He appears on any list that offers players in connection to usage.

Nevertheless he won two M.V.P. awards and over time will be remembered primarily for that achievement. Nevertheless that doesn’t mean he was the A.L.’s best player in those years.

In 1998 he drove in a league-leading 157 runs, but he had plenty of competition from the usual suspects in addition to some new ones for acknowledgement as best player.

Gonzalez received 21 of 28 votes for first and totaled 337 points to 232 for Nomar Garciaparra and 180 for Derek Jeter.

Critics of the writers’ voting decisions readily criticize them. That was the case with the Gonzalez awards, and that was the case when the writers voted Justin Morneau the A.L. M.V.P. in 2006.

Morneau received 15 first-place votes and 320 points to 12 and 306 for Derek Jeter and 193 points for David Ortiz.

Was Morneau the best player in the American League, or was he the most valuable players because of his contribution to the Twins’ division championship? I think it was clearly the latter.

There were better, at least more productive, players in the league that season. Morneau batted .321 with 34 home runs and 130 runs batted in. Ortiz slugged 54 homers, drove in 137 runs and mounted a .636 slugging percentage.

Travis Hafner had the best slugging percentage, .659, while tying for the best on-base percentage with .439. He hit 42 homers, tying for third. Morneau was sixth in slugging with .559 and 18^th in on-base with .375. His numbers weren’t as good as those of Ortiz and Hafner, but his production was more valuable, the voters, believed, than Ortiz’s was to the Red Sox and Hafner’s was to the Indians.

The issue of “best” versus “most valuable” arose from my asking members of the Baseball Writers Association why they voted for Mike Trout as high on the ballot as they did when Trout more often than not has played on a losing team, most recently this year.

I thank readers who have written and offered their thoughts on the subject, and I expect to publish more of the replies in a subsequent column.

In the meantime, I will add a thought of my own. I think the Trout voters overlook a fact of baseball life. It is easier for a player to perform naturally and have a better chance of hitting safely when the pressure of a pennant race is absent, when every at-bat isn’t a battle. Mookie Betts of the Red Sox played the entire season with the pressure that accompanies a season-long playoff battle with the Yankees. The Angels were out of contention by the summer.