The Exciting Story of Joey Votto’s Career

On Wednesday, Joey Votto officially announced his retirement from a major league career that spanned parts of 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 with Toronto, he stepped on a bat and twisted his ankle, and it took him until June to get back into games. He eventually reached Triple-A at the start of 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. “Sigh, I tried with all my heart to play for my people. I’m just not good anymore. Thank you for all the support during my attempt.”

“Anymore” is the key word there, because for the bulk of his career, Joey Votto banged. He retires with a .294/.409/.511 slash line, a 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 isn’t inducted into the Hall of Fame fairly quickly after he debuts on the ballot in four years. (He didn’t play in the majors this season, so for the purposes of eligibility, he retired after 2023.) Assuming he does, he’ll mainly get in on the basis of his tangible career accomplishments, with no controversy to counterbalance. My vote for him, so long as I haven’t prematurely shuffled off to eternity, will be based on his accomplishments as a player, but when it comes to Votto, his legacy is more than just his on-field performance.

As a baseball player, Votto was very much a 21st-century slugger, rather than the classic power hitter archetype. A phenomenally disciplined hitter, Votto swung at just 19% of pitches thrown to him outside the strike zone from 2012 to ’20 (using the Sports Info Solution data), second only to Alex Avila. It’s no coincidence that Votto was one of the most disciplined hitters around; you would be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t think of Votto as one of the game’s most thoughtful people. Whether hanging out at chess clubs, learning Spanish just to communicate better with teammates, or using his Players’ Weekend nickname to pay tribute to Canadian soldiers who died in World War I — by way of Canadian poet John McCrae’s famous poem, “In Flanders Fields” — he was always interesting, in the best possible way. Votto was a constant tinkerer of his swing and his approach at the plate, and when his career was on the definite downslope, he took the bold step of becoming more aggressive at the plate, a pretty big change for a player in his late 30s, squeezing out one last great offensive season in 2021 (36 homers, 140 wRC+).

Votto also spoke out about his experiences with grief and anxiety, back in 2009, when it was taboo for an athlete to talk publicly about their mental health. As Julie Kliegman reported in her recent book, Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes, players today are more open about their struggles with mental illness and more willing to seek the help that they need than they were 10-15 years ago; that’s because of stars like Votto and Zack Greinke, among others from across the sports landscape, who came forward at a time when mental-health conversations in sports were rare. This kind of thing has always resonated with me because my dad was severely psychologically affected by his experiences in Vietnam, and rather than being able to accept assistance — no matter how often and vigorously it was offered to him — he spent 25 years trying to drink away his memories, which he managed to do permanently in 1997. I’ll always have a very soft spot for someone who speaks up so that others can get help.

It’s bittersweet when a beloved player retires. It represents a sudden change in a player’s life, but also in ours. Suddenly, athletes have to accept that they will never again do the thing that they were best at doing for so long, and we realize we’ll never get to watch them do it again, either. As was the case with Buster Posey, Votto’s retirement hit me harder than I expected it would. There’s a real feeling of mortality when people you were writing about as young players are now old (in baseball terms) and out of baseball.

Okay, that’s enough sentimentality for this stathead; back to Votto’s career and Hall of Fame profile. Let’s look at his career numbers and see how they compare to other first basemen. Classifying players by position is never neat, but for the purposes of this piece, any player who appears on Jay Jaffe’s First Base JAWS leaders list will be considered a first baseman. However, I’ve removed any data from before 1901, simply because professional baseball in the 1800s was as much carnival sideshow as competitive sport. You could argue for a later – or even much later – starting point, but this deep into an article about Joey Votto isn’t the best place to have that fight.

By career WAR alone, Votto’s résumé isn’t that overwhelming, and it doesn’t help his case that he has just over 2,000 hits and fewer than 400 homers at an offense-first position, but one has to take peak performance and career length into consideration. I’m a big believer in looking at peak value — how good they are at their best over an extended period, divorced from the bulk counting stats at the start and end of their careers — so long as we’re talking about a peak that’s beyond just a couple of years. I think Aaron Judge is a Hall of Famer right now, and had I been a voter at the time, I would have cast my vote for Johan Santana. I’m also not positive that Félix Hernández shouldn’t be a Hall of Famer. It isn’t a flaw 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 just as good as or better than Koufax, the flaw is how you’re using the tool.

The Hall is about greatness, so I tend to prefer measures that include a peak run — such as WAR7 — and/or focus on wins above average rather than replacement. The table above is sorted by our version of WAR, but for the rest of this piece, I’m going to use Baseball Reference’s WAR, which ranks Votto slightly higher (64.5, 11th) than ours does, because that’s what Jay uses for JAWS. I am also using Baseball Reference’s wins above average to keep things consistent. Excluding anything that happened before 1901, Votto ranks seventh at the position in both WAA (37.7) and WAR7 (46.9) and ninth in JAWS (55.7). Except for those who were busted for performance enhancing drug use, all of the Hall of Fame-eligible players who rank in the top 15 by First Base JAWS have been inducted. Simply, Votto belongs in the Hall of Fame.

Votto’s fairly rapid decline kept him from gaudier WAR numbers. After a big drop-off in his power in 2018, his age 34 season, his resurgent 2021 campaign was a real outlier. But as Orson Welles once said, in one of my favorite quotes – and my desired epitaph – if you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop the story. Yes, many of us wanted another chapter, but Joey Votto’s career amounts to a banger of a story.