Joey Votto is clearly the Cincinnati Reds best player. He has been that since his first full season in the big leauges back in 2008. The lone exception of the 2014 season in which he suffered through a leg injury.
In the 2016 season he played 158 games and hit .326/.434/.550, good for a National League best 160 OPS+ (OPS adjusted for ballparks played in). That 160 OPS+ is only the 3rd best full season mark he’s ever posted. Votto bested that mark in his MVP season of 2009 (171) and in 2015 (174). He also topped it in 2012 (177), but only played in 111 games that year. For his career he’s posted a 157 OPS+, so in reality, 2016 was simply an average Joey Votto year.
You may recall just how good Joey Votto was in the second half of 2016. He hit .408/.490/.668 in the final 72 games of the year for the Reds. While it’s completely unrealistic to think that anyone is a true .400+ hitter, if you were to try and build a player who could do it, they would look an awful lot like second half Joey Votto.
In order to hit for a high average you need several things: You need a low strikeout rate. Spray the ball all around the field helps. You need to avoid easy outs (pop ups). You need to be lucky (high BABIP). Ideally, you’d also like to hit for power since home runs can’t be fielded and turned into outs.
Second half Joey Votto was incredible. The biggest reason for his turnaround, and absolute domination of opposing pitchers, was that he simply stopped striking out. The Reds first baseman had 32 strikeouts in 314 plate appearances. That’s a 10.1% strikeout rate. You just don’t see that low of a rate from players who have any sort of power. That’s the rate for guys who slap at the ball and just try and outrun things.
Of course, Joey Votto isn’t a slap hitter. In 72 second half games he had 19 doubles, two triples and 15 home runs. He also walked 47 times. As I noted above, you’ve also got to be a bit lucky in order to hit over .400, and in the second half, Votto had a batting average on balls in play of .418. While he’s constantly been one of the highest BABIP hitters in baseball since coming into the Major Leagues, even he isn’t THAT far up the list.
The 2016 version of Joey Votto wasn’t the best one we have seen if we are looking at the entire season. But the 2016 second half version is the best one that we’ve seen. What would a full season of Joey Votto look like, if he kept up his rates he showed in the second half, but had a more “Joey Votto-like” BABIP?
| PA | 2B | 3B | HR | BB | K | AVG | OBP | SLG | OPS |
| 675 | 41 | 4 | 32 | 101 | 69 | .363 | .459 | .619 | 1.079 |
Over a full season, that would be one heck of a year. It also puts into perspective just how good Joey Votto has been in his career given that it’s not really far off from what he’s been in a few other seasons of his career.
Votto came out last week and said that he wasn’t going to participate in the World Baseball Classic this upcoming spring.
There were some aspects of my performance in 2016 that I have decided were lacking.
The first half didn’t go as he would have liked. But if the second half was lacking, I’d like to see what the heck that version looks like. Hopefully we get a chance to see that version. A Joey Votto who rarely strikes out and had 75+ extra-base hits would be an incredible thing to see.
Going back to 2000, there have only been 29 player seasons where a player has had both 75+ extra-base hits and a strikeout rate of 10.5% or lower. That’s what second half Joey Votto would do. Among those 29 seasons, seven were accomplished by Albert Pujols, three by Nomar Garciaparra, three by Todd Helton, two by Barry Bonds, Brian Giles and Carlos Lee. It seems like forever ago at this point, but man, Albert Pujols was some kind of special.