Thank you for the lesson, Mr. Votto.
If you loved Joey Votto’s baseball career, it’s easy to trace the origin of said love back to the 2010 season. Fans of the Cincinnati Reds had been in a dismal, dismal place for quite some time, with the loss to the New York Mets in the 1999 tiebreaker the most recent semblance of ‘good vibes’ they’d experienced since the 1995 season.
Votto had emerged for good in 2008, his runner-up performance in the Rookie of the Year voting the first of several times he’d be robbed of a trophy that should now reside in his case. By 2010, the rest of the Reds had seemingly risen to join him, with a youthful wave of Jay Bruce, Drew Stubbs, Johnny Cueto, Mike Leake, Homer Bailey, and Travis Wood stepping up to pair with veterans like Scott Rolen, Orlando Cabrera, Bronson Arroyo, Aaron Harang, and Coco Cordero.
The 2010 Reds were good, man. They won 91 games and, courtesy of the biggest swing of Bruce’s life, the National League Central division. The playoffs, of course, went terribly, but that wasn’t enough to sink the momentum this young, controllable team had put in place. It was a new era of Reds baseball, and by season’s end they had Votto’s MVP award to forever celebrate with it.
All of that I loved. I’d been pulled back to Reds fandom after a mid-aughts odyssey away from it, as they’d been terrible, I’d gone away to college where games weren’t on television, and life began to come at me fast. But I’d moved back to Lexington by ‘07, flipped 700 WLW back on the AM radio while working on the farm during summer afternoons, and kept hearing about this Votto kid, this Bruce kid, this Bailey arm, and the farm system that was on the cusp of taking over. It was enough to prompt me to look for more information about this next wave of Reds, and I found it on The Internet™.
One of the prime sources about it on The Internet™? A place called Red Reporter, with a comment section as lively and voracious as the intellect displayed in the articles themselves. I showed up here as an AVG/HR/RBI guy who’d not watched a ton of baseball for a handful of years, but whose fandom had been seared into his brain as a young’n in 1990 and whose dad had grown up as big a Reds fan as anyone.
I knew enough about old baseball. I was here to find out where the game had gone, and how the Reds were poised to be a part of that. By 2010, the hivemind here and the burgeoning proliferation of advanced metrics like ‘WAR’ and ‘wRC+’ had made me watch the MVP race between Votto and Pujols in a way I’d never imagined before.
Pujols had won a trio of MVP awards at that point, including a pair in a row. He had more runs, more homers, and more RBI than Votto in 2010, and Colorado’s Carlos Gonzalez had won the batting title by hitting .336. Through Votto, and my fandom of him and all-things Reds, I’d sought refuge in deeper stats to justify just how much he deserved the award.
Votto led all of Major League Baseball in on-base percentage that year at .424, something he’d make a habit of doing for most of his career. His .600 slugging percentage and subsequent 1.024 OPS both led the National League, and it was becoming evident that the player for whom I was rooting in the race was a master of the rate stats in a game where, historically, the counting stats had always stood out.
I’m here to say I began loving Votto’s baseball career in 2010 because of his statistics that year as much as the on-field display. And when he was rewarded with his MVP because of those, the way in which I viewed baseball statistics - and sports statistics in all games - changed forever.
Allen Iverson made a career of scoring tons of points. But how many shots did he take? How many did he miss? How many could other players on the floor with him have taken from better spots?
Tim Couch damn near won a Heisman while quarterbacking the University of Kentucky, racking up yards, touchdowns, and points in a way never seen there before. But how many damn times did he have to throw the ball to do so? Did they ever run it? Why was their rushin attack so bad at the same time?
I began to not just question, but begin to understand - to rethink - the underlying numbers I’d both seen before and began seeking in the future. Through the pursuit of an easier way to explain why critiques of him were misguided, I inadvertantly began to re-learn how to value what it was that I found important in sport.
Efficiency. The word I stumbled upon without realizing I was looking for it was efficiency.
No wasted swings. No giving in and rolling over. No flippant plate appearances, no wasted outs. You only get 27 of them every game, after all, and how dare you give one away to an opposing pitcher in the name of guessing, hoping, and swinging wildly.
Votto became a chicken/egg situation for me, too. Was he as candid as he was, as introspective about his craft as he was because he had always been trying to reach the peak of this efficient sporting mentality? Or was the product he put on the field purely a byproduct or a larger personality that was this way about everything he did in life?
Could you possibly just study your way to this kind of historic offense, through Ted Williams’ Science of Hitting? Or, is this just the kind of baseball that can only be played by someone with a mind so unique as to create these goals on its own?
Dear god, if that’s what I put my brain through while marveling at each and every plate appearance of his, I can only begin to fathom the mental gymnastics attempted by every pitcher on the mound standing in to face him.
He knows what’s coming, dude. He knows you know he knows what’s coming, dude. He knows what your backup plan is because of all of this, dude, and how likely you’ll be to abandon the backup plan to try to double-super outsmart him, dude.
Wait, did he just step up in the batter’s box because he thinks I’m gonna throw him a changeup? Shit...I was totally going to throw him a changeup. Why’d he take a step back...I haven’t even thrown the pitch yet?!
He had you in checkmate before the series started two days ago and you were named the starter, dude. He knows what relievers aren’t available that day, how long your leash is, and how many pitches he can spoil to put the pressure on the opposing manager earlier than they’d like, dude. And now that you know that he knows that you know all of that, try to execute whatever pitch you think might work to the best of your ability lest it miss outside or - god forbid - right down the middle where he’ll knock it to the moon, dude.
Crikey. I’d just throw four pitches closer to the dugout than the plate and walk him, too.
Joey Votto was far from the first professional baseball player who made a tenet of his philosophy to not make outs. Few, if any (given the advances in modern pitching), managed to be in the same stratosphere as him at actually being good at it, however. Fewer still found themselves actually taking analysis of how he got there, tracking their o-swing % and z-swing % as much or more as they watched video of their own swings.
He, and his game, came to encompass the modern way in which we evaluate sports statistics themselves - through qualitative means more than just quantitative. As the game of baseball moved further away from the counting stats that filled hard-copy newspaper box scores and closer to the rate stats that helped be more predictive, there’s no coincidence that Votto’s number in whatever category that was would find its way to the absolute top of said leaderboard.
He was gold in a cash market before the value of the currency deflated and gold, like it had always been despite some choosing to overlook it, remains king.
He’ll have his detractors as his legacy ages. Ernie Banks and Luke Appling never played a single postseason game, Barry Larkin was hurt too much, and Jim Rice only posted 47.7 bWAR, after all. None of those players had perfect careers, nor did Votto - Hall of Famers all of them, still.
When he called time on his playing days while in Buffalo this week, I put a large part of my baseball brain on the shelf for the final time. An even bigger part of it, though, now feels like the training wheels are off and it now knows how to ride without crashing, and that’s purely because I was lucky enough to spend the bulk of the last two decades following the career of a player whose on-field performance redefined the spreadsheets in front of my face that serve as the modern-day baseball cards of old.
I’ll miss watching his nuance, too. The numbers and stats and such were otherworldly, as I think I’ve laid out, but stuff like this just never gets old.
A hat-tip to you, Joseph Daniel, on a Hall of Fame career. That bus you said you wanted to drive when you retired? Well, let’s just say it’s felt for 17 years like you were driving me and the Red Reporter crew to baseball school each and every day with the way you went about your game in a before-your-time kind of way. A true innovater, you’ve been, and for that we’ll be forever thankful.
Kick your feet up and grow a beard. That’s what us old folk do nowadays.
