Over the course of his 17-year career, the future Hall of Famer bested pitchers more frequently than almost any other player.
Bat in hand, Joey Votto could make your jaw drop. He did so not by one-off displays of power. It was more subtle, more intricate. It wasn’t a motorcyclist jumping over a row of RVs. It was more like an aerialist, leaping and pirouetting on the equivalent of a string high above us.And it wasn’t until a year later, on May 20, 2013, on a cutter from Shaun Marcum of the New York Mets at Citi Field, that he did it a second time.
Baseball is a complicated game. Every night an average of 292 pitches are propelled toward home plate with the vast permutations of a giant game of pachinko. At its core, however, baseball is as simple as wrestling at the first Olympics in 776 BC : it is a one-on-one battle. And then every once in a while a hitter comes along who wins that battle so often over so many years that he seems to have come across some cheat code. Votto was among the very best ever at winning those battles.
I once asked Votto to identify the most important element of his swing. He replied, “Generally, I always try to stay inside the ball. I try to make sure when I make contact with the ball it’s not topspin or carved—it’s coming off true.”
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