The directions for voting for the award mention "actual contribution to the team", and explicitly say that the winner need not come from a playoff team. Trout simply contributed more wins to his team than Betts did to his.
As for Verlander and advanced stats. No, that's not it. Verlander does very well by the advanced stats. He actually led the league in baseball-reference's version of WAR (albeit by a meaninglessly small margin over Kluber). I don't know why Verlander was left off two ballots, he really shouldn't have been.
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