This year, somewhat famously, Philadelphia Phillies shortstop Jimmy Rollins became the first player in major league history to hit 20 triples, 30 home runs, and steal 40 bases. He even more famously said his Phillies were the team to beat in the National League East and then led his team on one of baseball’s great comebacks. In the last game of the season, Rollins scored the first run after stealing second and third, and the Phillies never gave up the lead.

So it was no surprise when Rollins was announced as the winner of the National League’s Most Valuable Player award yesterday. I was glad when I learned he had. There are plenty of Hall of Famers who never had a year as good as Rollins did between the lines, and far more who never did anything as memorable as issuing a Namathesque proclamation before leading a nearly mathematically impossible charge to the pennant. Because he did both, I was rooting for him. Still, as is usually true, the voting can be protested along various lines. Unusually, everyone has a valid argument.

Most debates over MVP voting devolve into philosophizing on the meaning and nature of value. One man’s partisans point to his superior statistics, while the other’s point to mysterious virtues that transcend the box score, which in practice usually entail having good teammates. “It’s not an award for the best player,” the latter always point out, “but for the most valuable player.” The word valuable is always stressed, and delivered as if it is an unanswerable rhetorical death strike.

This is rubbish; award voters are given a precise meaning of the word “value.” According to the MVP ballot, it consists of “strength of offense and defense.” Usually people arguing for a player who was demonstrably better statistically will treat this as a completely irrefutable proof of their rightness. (I have done this.) Problematically, though, value is not all that goes into choosing an MVP, as the ballot does list two other important criteria: games played, and “general character, disposition, loyalty and effort.” Those who want to argue for their man because he is a thoughtful guy who brings homemade cookies to teammates on their birthdays are free to do so according to the letter of the law.

Here is what makes this year’s voting interesting. By the first, most often cited criterion, Rollins is not a deserving MVP; taking in the full range, he probably is.

Any attempt to claim that Rollins had the strongest offense and defense in the league is spurious; he wasn’t close. Any comprehensive statistic that adjusts for park effects and accounts for positional value, base stealing, and playing time will show as much. Baseball Prospectus’ Value Over Replacement Player, for instance, had Rollins as the ninth best hitter in the league, 20 runs behind Florida’s Hanley Ramirez. David Wright hit .325 AVG/.416 OBA/.546 SLG, stole 34 bases, played 160 games at third, and hit .397 in the Mets’ last 17 inglorious games. (Rollins hit .303 during this time.) Even considering that he’s a shortstop, even giving him credit for his steals and playing time, Rollins was not as good on offense as Wright, or Matt Holliday, or several others.

Rollins can’t make up all of this gap with his glove, either. He can make a lot of it up — he is a very good shortstop, good enough to more than erase the chasm between his bat and Ramirez’s. Wright, though, is a Gold Glove third baseman, while Pujols is probably the best first baseman in baseball. The difference in offense is greater than the difference in defense; Wright and Pujols were clearly more valuable than Rollins this year, while Matt Holliday and even Chase Utley, who missed 30 games, may have been.

There are, though, still those other criteria. The real knock on Rollins is that his gaudy statistics — the above-mentioned trifecta, the 139 runs, the 90 runs driven in from the leadoff spot — are the weird result of Rollins having played in a hitter’s park on a good offensive team. In this telling, the most important Rollins statistic was 521. That’s the number of outs he made. It ranks 10th all-time.

This has to be set, though, against the fact that Rollins set major league records for at-bats and plate appearances. By setting out playing time as an independent criteria, the MVP ballot clearly assumes that there is inherent worth in an iron man above and beyond that captured by his value, strictly defined. Surely if anyone should ever get special credit for playing time, it would be a shortstop who came to the plate more often than anyone, ever. And whatever general character and disposition mean, exactly, they surely encompass what Rollins showed as the vocal leader of a team that mounted a historic comeback, a player who at least every time I saw him was playing about as intensely as possible. He may not have had the most value, but according to the rules there is more than value to being the most valuable player.

Anyone who doesn’t like this should probably take it up with the commissioner.

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I find it as odd as anyone else does that another team actually traded a living, breathing human being for Guillermo Mota, but there you have it: The Milwaukee Brewers shipped catcher Johnny Estrada to Flushing in exchange for the rights to the reviled reliever. Estrada has showed an odd pattern in his career: In even numbered years he has hit like Paul Lo Duca, and in odd numbered years, he’s hit like unlamented Yankees backup John Flaherty. Since he carries no special defensive reputation, Estrada is valuable mostly because next year is 2008, and because he is not Guillermo Mota.

tmarchman@nysun.com