Joey Votto to the Toronto Blue Jays: better very late than never
There's every chance the 40-year-old former MVP won't make much of an impact for his hometown team, but spring is a time for hope
Several years back I was given the task of writing a piece on Joey Votto, who had just been voted Postmedia’s Male Athlete of the Year.
There were a couple of challenges. It was December, so not an easy time of year to chase down a Major League Baseball player. And Votto had just days earlier been named the winner of the Lou Marsh Award, since renamed because Lou Marsh is cancelled, and had done an interview for that. So, it was his offseason, and he had already answered questions from a Canadian reporter days earlier. Strike one, strike two.
The Cincinnati Red PR guy presented a new problem: Votto was getting ready to travel back to Toronto for the holidays. But he said he’d put in a call and get back to me.
Later that evening, I was driving somewhere with a kid in the backseat when the phone rang. I answered on speaker. (Safety first.) It was Joey Votto. He asked if he caught me at a bad time, presumably aware that I sounded startled. I said no, all good — never let the interview subject off the phone when it’s a tough get — and proceeded to pull into a random parking lot.
And that’s how I ended up interviewing the former National League MVP while a child sat quietly and wondered how long this was going to take.
The Toronto Blue Jays signing Votto to a minor-league deal is one of the all-time good-vibes moves. He was an elite hitter as recently as two seasons ago, but at 40 years old there’s a better-than-decent chance that he won’t have much of an impact with the Jays, if he’s able to make the major-league roster at all. It feels a little like Eric Lindros joining the Toronto Maple Leafs for 33 games or, worst-case scenario, Doug Gilmour’s second go-round in Toronto, which lasted for a few shifts.
But you can’t help but hope that it will be much better than that, that Votto will have some kind of role on his hometown team as it plays Meaningful September Baseball in front of big Rogers Centre crowds. Votto has always been an unassuming star, the kind of guy who would phone a reporter he doesn’t know even as he’s busy packing his car, but in the latter phase of his career he’s been fully self-deprecating. True to form, he has taken this Jays tryout as just that, even though he has a Hall of Fame resume. He took a minor-league number for his jersey (37), then cautioned fans not to rush out and buy one. If he makes the team, he might wear a different number. One thing at time.
He does have one significant factor in his favour: the guy can absolutely rake. He led the National League in on-base percentage seven times, has more than 800 extra-base hits and has a career OPS of .920. That’s over 17 seasons. To put that in perspective, Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., has only had an OPS that high over a single season once in his career. Bo Bichette has never cracked that mark over a full season. George Springer did it once. Votto has averaged that amount of production, even with a couple of recent injury-plagued seasons weighing it down. It’s wild. He also did this while playing for a Cincinnati team that largely stunk, meaning he had very little protection in the lineup. (Votto led the National League in intentional walks three times.)
All that Reds-related stinking is another reason to hope Votto gets some important late-season at-bats. For all he has accomplished, his postseason career is just 11 games long. He has won only two playoff games, which rather obviously means he never won a postseason series with the Reds. Not even the one-game kind!
Votto, ever the throwback, didn’t push for a trade or pout about his circumstances. I asked him, as diplomatically as I could, about playing for yet another crappy Reds team back in 2017. He still had six years to go on a 10-year, US$225-million contract. And he was fine with it. Or at least, he was accepting of his reality. “It sucks seeing other teams win on your field, and it sucks seeing the stadium empty, “ he said. Votto said it was tough to go back to Toronto then and see people excited about the Jays, still buzzing during the Bautista-Encarnacion years. But he also said signing a long-term deal came with trade-offs that he respected. He played out all 10 years of that deal. The Reds won 83 games in 2021, and 82 last year. Those were their best seasons.
For the life of me I don’t know why the Jays didn’t try to pry Votto out of Cincinnati years ago, when he was still close to his best and the Toronto front office could have really used a PR win. But they didn’t, he honoured his deal in southern Ohio, and now he’s back home to close the circle on his career.
I hope he gets some nice moments. And not just because he called me back that one time.