Joey Votto Cracked the Code of Hitting

Over the course of his 17-year career, the future Hall of Famer bested pitchers more frequently than almost any other player.

Kareem Elgazzar/The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK

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. How does he do that? 

One day in 2012 he made my jaw drop without a bat in his hands. He told me he had not pulled a foul ball into the stands since his rookie year of 2007. What?! 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. Six years without pulling a foul into the stands? Who could have a swing so pure to do that? Only Votto.

Another jaw-dropper: Votto saw 30,277 pitches over 13 years before he popped out to first base for the first time in the major leagues. A changeup from Pedro Báez of the Dodgers in 2019 finally flummoxed the great Votto.

Starting in 2011, he went four years without popping up anywhere on the pull side, an astounding run of 7,738 pitches. That, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is hitting with the greatest of ease.

(José Ramírez of the Cleveland Guardians, a superb hitter, has popped out to the pull side 15 times this year.)

Upon Votto’s announcement Wednesday that he is retiring, and as the usual rush to decide Hall of Fame worthiness began (players are eligible five years after their last game), I thought about how thoroughly Votto enjoyed and mastered the art of hitting. And yes, it was a passion worthy of Cooperstown.

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 (though clothed): it is a one-on-one battle.

The foundation of baseball is batter vs. pitcher. Everything else—the defense, the baserunning, the strategy, the coaching, the highlights, the soft ice cream in a mini plastic helmet, everything—springs from that battle. Keeping track of who wins that battle is simple. Either the pitcher gets the hitter out or he doesn’t.

The contest is tilted heavily in favor of the pitcher. Only the pitcher knows what’s coming. Today the pitcher wins 69% of the time.

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.

In the spirit of the pitcher-hitter dynamic, let’s keep this simple. There have been 293 players to come to the plate 8,000 times in the major leagues. Only 29 of those hitters ever won the pitcher-hitter battle 40% of the time—that is, an on-base percentage of .400 over a huge sample. All of them are in the Hall of Fame but three: steroid taints Barry Bonds and Manny Ramírez and Votto, who will be making his acceptance speech in the summer of 2029. And given Votto’s inquisitive mind, that speech will be a jaw-dropper, too.

Votto’s flawless swing and tremendous intellect made him one of the best hitters the game has ever seen. / Albert Cesare / The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK

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.”

The path of his hands was so direct that he avoided getting around the ball, which can lead to those fouls yanked to the pull side, and never had to cheat to hit the ball out front, which can lead to those pull-side pop-ups. Like his hands, his mind was another weapon. He retained information and discerned patterns as well as any hitter in his generation. The more pitches he saw in an at-bat—and he saw plenty‚the more Votto controlled the outcome.

“I feel like the more pitches I see the more information I have,” Votto once told me. “I can start checking pitches off the more I see. I study pitchers and have an idea of what they're trying to do. And then as I see pitches in an at-bat I start to check them off in my mind until I get to a point where I have a good idea of what's coming. You can call it guessing if you want.”

Guessing is too reductive. “Feel” fits better, that sense of knowing what is coming next and where. 

Votto was 35 by the time he popped up to first base for the first time. Báez threw him a 3-and-1 changeup on the outside corner, about belt high. What made the swing so unusual was that Votto was fooled. It is one of the rare swings you will find of Votto in which he is out over his front leg and his top hand comes off the bat just after contact, the tell-tale sign that the batter is fooled. It almost never happened, such was his balance and awareness.

(The pop-up was caught in foul territory. Votto popped out to first base on a fair ball only once in his career, in 2022, at age 38, against a curveball from Ian Anderson of the Atlanta Braves. It only took 33,259 pitches.)

I can give you other superlatives about how Votto’s career numbers are worthy of Cooperstown. About how he finished with 2,135 hits, just 25 short of Larry Walker for the most among Canadian-born players. Walker, a Hall of Famer, is close statistical comp to Votto—and Votto has the better OPS+, 144 to 141.

About how he led the league in OBP seven times, including four years in a row. 

About how he is one of only 22 players with 300 homers and a .400 OBP. (His .409 OBP ranks 16th best among that group.)

About how in his 10-year prime (2009–18) he slashed .312/.434/.532 while averaging 24.1 home runs per year—and just 6.5 pop-outs! Votto, a first baseman who was not fleet, was more likely in his prime to steal a base (66) than pop out (65).

All very cool. But nothing captures Votto’s worthiness than the very DNA strand of baseball from which all life of the game springs: batter vs. pitcher. Votto against whatever fiendish velocity, spin and pattern the pitcher has in store. Votto cracked the code with jaw-dropping frequency.