There’s an etiquette about batting practice in the big leagues. It’s fine to goof around outside the cage, talking to teammates, opponents, or the various hangers-on, as you wait your turn. But once you’re standing at the plate, it’s all business—take your hacks and make way for the next guy.
Then there’s Joey Votto. It’s not that the Toronto-born first baseman for the Cincinnati Reds violates the convention—far from it. He just makes it seem like an extra commandment. The preceding hitter has barely cleared the box before the 27-year-old is in his crouch, bat at the ready. He slashes the first pitch down the left-field line, then works his way right across the diamond—tock, tock, tock. The next five balls get launched into or over the high netting that tops the outfield walls at the Reds’ spring training complex in Goodyear, Ariz.—three in a row to right, then two to left. It’s all so workaday that Votto doesn’t even bother to watch them go, he’s already waiting for the next pitch. Focused is a term that hardly does him justice.
So when the reigning National League MVP, coming off a season where he hit .324, smashed 37 homers, and batted in 113 runs and led the Reds to their first playoff berth in 15 years, proclaims that he can get better still, who’s to argue? “I want to be great at what I do. I take a lot of pride in it,” says Votto. “And I try not to sell myself short in my work and preparation.” Between awards ceremonies this past winter (Votto also collected the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s top athlete, and the Hank Aaron Award as the NL’s top hitter), he worked out five hours a day, six times a week at his Florida home. The guy who had the best on-base percentage in baseball, and went an entire season without an infield pop-out, talks about how he hopes to be a more efficient hitter, stronger defensively, and a better teammate. He speaks earnestly about proving himself all over again, and how he really measures himself against the man who finished a distant second in the league’s MVP voting, Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals, “the best player in baseball.”
If Votto has a dream, it’s to be numbingly consistent. “I think I am boring. That’s good. I strive for boring in all elements of my game.” And if the intensely private slugger has got an ambition, it’s to somehow remain baseball’s anonymous superstar. “One of the advantages of playing in a smaller market is that I can go back to Toronto, or all across the States and never be recognized,” he says. “I get to go out to dinner, walk my dog, or go to the mall and nobody knows who I am.”
Last season, his third full year in the majors, Joey Votto earned US$525,000. His new contract will pay him a total of $38 million through 2013. Out front of the Reds’ training complex, dozens of luxury vehicles—Escalades, Land Rovers, even a red Ferrari with Florida plates—are being loaded onto car transporters bound for Ohio. Votto stammers a bit when asked if one of them is his, then deftly sidesteps the question. “I don’t think materialistic things are my priority,” he says. Nine years after he got drafted out of high school, Votto says he’s still spending his $600,000 signing bonus.
The bat was a gift from his parents on his eighth birthday. While they worked cooking and serving at the family restaurant—the one they all lived above on Oakville’s lakeshore—Joey spent time out back using it to smack balls off the brick wall. That’s his first baseball memory. His late father Joe, a chef by trade, taught him to play, with daily games of catch on breaks from the kitchen. The next summer, his little league debut, the restaurant sponsored his team. Joey pitched in the championship game.
By the time he entered high school, the business had failed, the family were living in even more modest circumstances in nearby Etobicoke, and the game had become more than a pastime. “Baseball was comfortable for me. It felt right. It was kind of an escape,” says Votto. “Something I could put all my energy into, both positive and negative.”
Bob Smyth, then the owner of a local baseball academy, started coaching him when he was 15. The hulking Votto—now six foot three, 230 lb.—was already bigger and stronger than most kids his age, but what really set him apart was his desire. “If you told him to work on something, he’d go and do it,” Smyth says from his home on Vancouver Island, where he’s now a part-time scout for Major League Baseball. Blessed with power to both fields, he became a maniac for off-field training, spending nights and weekends during the long Canadian winters in the batting cage, working on pitch recognition and covering every inch of the plate.
It was the raw strength that impressed John Castleberry, then a scout with the Reds. Dispatched to Toronto to check out a kid who had caught some eyes at a youth prospect game with his bat speed and aggressiveness, he found what he was sure was a major leaguer in waiting. “I saw him in the cage hitting, and he was literally ripping the net off it,” says Castleberry, now with the San Francisco Giants. “I just went, oh my God!” Worried that other teams would clue in, the Reds kept things quiet, waiting until just days before the 2002 draft to fly in their scouting director for a first-hand look. In the end, they made Votto their second-round pick, 44th overall, beating the Yankees, the only other club with any interest, to the punch.
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