On Wednesday, Joey Votto officially announced his retirement from a major league career that spanned 17 seasons, all with the Cincinnati Reds. He hit free agency for the first time last winter before signing a minor league contract with the Toronto Blue Jays, his hometown team. During his first spring training game against Toronto, he stepped on a bat and twisted his ankle, and it took him until June to return to action. He finally reached Triple-A earlier this month but struggled there, hitting .143/.275/.214 with 22 strikeouts in 51 plate appearances with Buffalo.
“Toronto + Canada, I wanted to play in front of you,” Votto wrote on Instagram. “Bubula, I tried with all my heart to play for my people. I'm not just pretty anymore. Thank you for supporting me when I'm trying.”
“However” is the key word there, because for most of his career, Joey Votto hit. He retires with a slash line of .294/.409/511, 145 wRC+, 58.8 WAR, 356 home runs, and 2,135 hits. He made six All-Star teams, won the NL MVP award in 2010, and ranks 40th all-time in career MVP shares at 3.08.
I will be very surprised if Votto is inducted into the Hall of Fame as soon as he gets on the ballot in four years. (He didn't play in the majors this season, so for eligibility purposes, he's retired after 2023.) Assuming he does, he'll get in pretty much on the basis of his apparent career accomplishments, without an argument to the contrary. My vote for him, as long as I haven't changed forever, will be based on his accomplishments as a player, but when it comes to Votto, his legacy is more than just his performance on the field.
As a baseball player, Votto was a 21st century slugger, rather than a classic power hitter archetype. A brilliant hitter, Votto threw 19% of pitches to him outside the strike zone from 2012 to '20 (using Sports Info Solution data), second only to Alex Avila. It's no coincidence that Votto has been one of the most prolific hitters; you will be hard pressed to find someone this is not the case think of Votto as one of the greatest thinkers in the game. Whether it's hanging out at chess clubs, learning Spanish just to better communicate with colleagues, or using his nickname of Players Weekend to honor Canadian soldiers who died in World War I — with Canadian poet John McCrae's famous poem, “Flanders Fields. ” — he was always interesting, in the best way. Votto had always considered his swing and approach at the plate, and when his career was at a low point, he took the bold step of being more aggressive at the plate, a big change for a player approaching 30 years old, coming off one last good season in 2021 (36 homers, 140 wRC+).
Votto also spoke about his experiences with grief and anxiety, back in 2009, when it was not allowed for an athlete to speak publicly about his mental health. As Julie Kliegman reported in her recent book, The Mental Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook for Elite Athletesplayers today are more open about their mental health issues and more willing to seek the help they need than they were 10-15 years ago; that's thanks to stars like Votto and Zack Greinke, among others from across the spectrum of sports, who emerged at a time when discussions of mental health in sports were rare. This kind of thing has always affected me because my father was very psychologically affected by his experience in Vietnam, and rather than being able to accept help – no matter how often and strongly it was offered – he spent 25 years trying to drink. erased his memories, which he was able to do permanently in 1997. I will always have someone to talk to so others can get help.
It's sad when your favorite player retires. It represents a sudden change in the player's life, but also in ours. Suddenly, athletes have to accept that they will never be able to do what they have been doing so well for so long, and we realize that we will never watch them do it again. As with Buster Posey, Votto's retirement hit me harder than I expected. There is a real sense of death when people you wrote about as young players are now old (in baseball terms) and out of baseball.
Okay, that's enough emotions for this article; back to Votto's career and Hall of Fame profile. Let's take a look at his career numbers and see how they compare to other first basemen. Classifying players by position has never been neat, but for the purposes of this piece, any player from Jay Jaffe's First Base JAWS leaderboard will be considered a first baseman. However, I removed any data prior to 1901, because professional baseball in the 1800s was as much a carnival sideshow as a competitive sport. You can argue for a later – or much later – starting point, but this deep into an article about Joey Votto is not the best place to hold that battle.
Leaders of the First Base War, 1901-2024
By career WAR alone, Votto's CV isn't that impressive, and it doesn't help his case that he had just over 2,000 hits and less than 400 homers at first base, but one has to take the high performance and length of the career. considered. I'm a big believer in looking at the highest value – how good they are over the long term, separated from the quantitative statistics at the beginning and end of their career – as long as we're talking about the highest value over just a few years. I think Aaron Judge is a Hall of Famer right now, and if I was a voter then, I would have voted for Johan Santana. And I'm not sure Félix Hernández should not be the Hall of Fame. It's not wrong in the data that Jack Morris has more career WAR than Sandy Koufax, but if you're using WAR to make the case that Morris was as good or better than Koufax, it's wrong how you do it. using a tool.
The hall is near sizeso I tend to choose modes that include high runs – such as WAR7 – and/or focus on wins above average instead of being replaced. The table above is sorted by our type of WAR, but for the rest of this piece, I'll use Baseball Reference's WAR, which has a slightly higher Votto rating (64.5, 11th) than ours, because that's what Jay uses on JAWS. . I also use Baseball Reference's win over average to keep things consistent. Excluding anything that happened before 1901, Votto ranked seventh at the position in both WAA (37.7) and WAR7 (46.9) and ninth in JAWS (55.7). With the exception of those convicted of performance-enhancing drug use, all eligible Hall of Fame players ranked in the top 15 by First Base JAWS are included. Simply put, Votto belongs in the Hall of Fame.
Votto's rapid decline kept him at gaudier WAR numbers. After a significant decline in his power in 2018, his age-34 season, his resurgent campaign in 2021 was a real exception. But like Orson Welles he once saidin one of my favorite quotes – and the epitaph I'm looking for – if you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you set the story. Yes, many of us wanted another chapter, but Joey Votto's career is like a collision of stories.
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