Joey Votto Tries to Bounce Back

Joey Votto has yet to play a spring training game, and he probably won’t for at least a little while longer as he recuperates from the surgery on his left shoulder that ended his 2022 season. That hasn’t stopped the 39-year-old future Hall of Famer from filling reporters’ notebooks now that camp has opened, particularly as he heads into the final year of his 10-year contract and perhaps his final year in the majors.

Votto hit just .205/.319/.370 with 11 homers in 376 plate appearances last year; all of those slash stats were career lows, as were his 92 wRC+ and -0.9 WAR. His performance was particularly dismaying given his 2021 resurgence. Reversing a 2019-20 skid during which he had managed just a 101 wRC+, 26 homers, and 1.1 WAR, he hit .266/.375/.563 (139 wRC+) with 36 homers in 533 PA; all told, it was his best season since 2017.

That made the sudden arrival of Votto’s worst season all the more jarring, even though we’ve all become accustomed to seeing even great players in their late 30s fall apart. Last week, Votto offered an eye-catching, blunt assessment of his season:

Joey Votto said he felt like he was getting better last year after he ditched his "bullshit bat" and "greedy" approach. "But again, maybe I played like shit because I’m not good anymore, we’ll see. I doubt that, but we’ll see. I’m excited about the challenge."

— C. Trent Rosecrans (@ctrent) February 19, 2023

The bat to which Votto is referring is a 36-inch Marucci model with a hockey puck knob on the end. (As he noted in a recent oral history at The Athletic, “That was what we call in chess, a blunder.”) The company tailored the bat to his swing and to his goal of leading the big leagues in barrels; he had produced a career-best 17.2% barrel rate the year before, good for ninth in the majors. The greed concerned his willingness to chase balls outside of the strike zone in pursuit of pull-side power, an approach that had marked a departure for him even while serving him well in 2021. He finished one homer shy of his career high while posting his highest full-season pull rate (43.4%), offsetting his highest chase rate since 2011 (24.7%) and his highest strikeout rate to that point (23.8%).

Votto used the new bat last spring and felt comfortable enough to keep going with it once the season began, but through the first 17 games, his results were anemic; he not only wasn’t hitting the ball hard, he was striking out at an alarming rate:

As you can see by the data above, Votto fared better after reverting to the 34-inch, 32-ounce Louisville Slugger M356 model he had used since teammate Jay Bruce recommended it to him while the two were in the minors. Additionally, after the change in bats, he dropped from a 30.2% chase rate to 28.5% and from a 42.4% pull rate to 39.6%. All of the numbers in the second set took a hit with his 2-for-36 skid from August 7-16; before that, he was at .244/.353/.465 over a 65-game stretch.

But even if one searches for a silver lining, it’s tough to escape the extent to which Votto was out of whack. He set new career highs with a 25.8% strikeout rate and a 7.1% infield fly ball rate, accompanying those with a 44.4% groundball rate, his highest since 2010. With 10th-percentile sprint speed, you’re just not going to beat out that many grounders.

By mid-August, Votto couldn’t surmount what he called “the injury hurdle.” Per The Athletic’s C. Trent Rosecrans, “At times last season, he said he had intense pain and couldn’t grip the bat. While the shoulder injury limited his range of motion, he said the biceps injury was what limited his ability to play.”

“When I say I couldn’t practice behind the scenes, I couldn’t practice behind the scenes,” said Votto. “I hit a few balls off a tee, take a couple of swings off a seated arm and play the game. And I’ve never been that way. I’ve been the type that stays late when the lights are out, the clubhouse is empty and hit in the cage until whatever the f— it takes. I couldn’t do that.”

On August 19, Votto underwent season-ending surgery to repair tears in both the rotator cuff and biceps of his left shoulder. That was just over six months ago, and he’s not yet ready to begin playing in exhibition games (clubhouse games of chess are another matter). “I need game-speed reps. I haven’t come close to taking those yet. I’ve never been in this position before,” he said.

Once that happens — and it may not happen in time for him to be in the Opening Day lineup on March 30 — what can we expect out of Votto this year? Towards that end, I asked Dan Szymborski to supply me with the first baseman’s percentile projections for a better sense of the range of possibilities:

Last year, major league first basemen as a group hit for a 113 OPS+ (111 wRC+). ZiPS only sees about a 30% chance of Votto performing that well or better given his recent ups and downs, and somewhere in the 5% range of meeting or exceeding his 2021 level. Obviously, those aren’t great odds, but then the recent history of 39-year-old position players tells us not to expect much:

Even if one throws out the catchers (the Molina brothers, Pierzynski, and Ross) and thus raises the playing time bar, the remaining 10 position players — the majority of whom are either present or future Hall of Famers — produced a median wRC+ of 90 and a median WAR of 0.9. Depending upon which measure you use, those are something along the lines of 40th- to 60th-percentile outcomes for Votto, far more likely than another 2021-type season.

Indeed, ZiPS suggests Votto may not have a whole lot left in the tank. Here’s the projection based on his 50th-percentile performance:

The only way Votto projects to have a 2024 season that’s something beyond an afterthought would be via an extremely unlikely outcome. Here’s one based on his 90th percentile 2023 performance:

All of which is to say that between these meager projections and the fact that he’s in the final guaranteed season of his 10-year, $225 million deal (he does have a $20 million option with a $7 million buyout), we may be looking at Votto’s last lap around the league. At the moment, he doesn’t seem too wrapped up in that possibility (“I think that it’s hard to be nostalgic when you’re focused on performing,” he said last week), which makes complete sense.

If Votto can’t answer the bell, free agent addition Wil Myers is the likely choice to fill in at first base. He played 25 games there last year, and served as San Diego’s regular first baseman in 2016-17. Per manager David Bell, Tyler Stephenson will play first base around two games out of every 10 in an effort to keep his bat in the lineup.

As that list of 39-year-old hitters above reminds us, it doesn’t always end well even for the great ones. If you think it’s been tough watching Votto at times in recent years, his decline has been minimal compared to the multiyear slides of both Pujols and Cabrera. The latter has netted -2.1 WAR over the past six seasons even while becoming just the seventh player to reach both 500 homers and 3,000 hits. Cabrera has backslid from being tied with Jim Thome for 10th in JAWS among first basemen at 57.3 to ranking 11th outright at 56.3, while Votto (whose bWAR was only -0.3 last year) is less than a point behind him at 55.6. Both are well above a JAWS standard (53.4) that’s dropped a bit with the recent additions of Gil Hodges and Fred McGriff. If you’re not convinced that Votto is Cooperstown bound, consider that he is three spots above Todd Helton, who’s on the doorstep after receiving 72.2% last month; a 46.6-WAR peak score, 10th all-time among first basemen, has powered Helton’s ranking, but Votto is a notch above him at 46.9.

Maybe this won’t be the end for Votto. But even if it is, it seems highly likely we’ll be hearing more from him in the years to come.