Joey Votto Is Playing Chess

It's a shame that describing the interplay between pitchers and hitters as a chess match has achieved Unpardonable Cliche status. It's hard to tell, for example, what Matt Harvey meant to say when he wrote ("wrote") this at The Players Tribune: "Pitching is a chess game—except you're throwing a chess piece at 96 mph." He's just saying it, because it is a thing that gets said.

The shame of it is that it's a pretty good metaphor. On the board as on the mound, the goal is to exert control over space that you don't presently occupy. Custody over the crucial central squares of the board is won by bishops and knights in the wings. The crucial central inches over the plate are won by preceding reputations, by the work done over hundreds of previous innings: there is nothing, physically, preventing a pitch being thrown to a certain place—only the knowledge that it will be brutally clobbered (or not) by the man at the plate. In this game, few humans have a better claim at grandmaster status than Joey Votto of the Cincinnati Reds.

Between his Canadian-ness and famous—to the point where the Hot Take Community has boomeranged it into infamy— ability to draw walks, Votto will almost always be labelled "cerebral." That's not inaccurate—but it's worth defining "cerebral" a bit more precisely. Between pitches, Votto does not stroll the grass edge surrounding the batter's box, he does not dick around with his gloves, and he does not look skyward as if the heavens contain the solutions to the riddle of pitch sequencing. After some pitches Votto will briefly discuss with the umpire—in an effort to become acquainted with that evening's strike zone, it seems, instead of to argue—but mostly he just gets back into his stance, already prepared for the next pitch. It can seem like Votto takes so little time at the plate because, having studied his opponent so thoroughly, he already knows what the pitcher will offer him before the pitcher realizes it himself.

Being cerebral has not precluded Votto from labeling himself "a bad motherfucker." Nor has it prevented him from packing a mountie's uniform on road trips, for, you know, all the potential hijinks.

Barring cataclysmic injury—or recurring nags like the quadriceps injury that turned his 2014 season into a six-month mulligan—Votto is headed to the Hall of Fame. The reason that Votto isn't routinely celebrated as such is entirely the fault of the Reds, who drafted him in 2002 and have him under contract through 2024. For one, there is the generally mediocre roster that surrounds Votto. The team has made the playoffs just three times this century, winning a series zero of those times. Votto is Sisyphus and the Reds are his boulder.

More damningly: the boulder has decided, frequently, to critique the technique with which they are being shoved uphill. The manager Votto has played under the longest, Dusty Baker, is responsible for one of baseball's most-ever stupefying quotes, saying that baserunners on his own team are undesirable since they "clog up the basepaths." Reds second baseman Brandon Phillips, who has had a daily and intimate view of the entirety of Votto's career, decided this spring to chirp up and spout some senile non sequiturs about "advanced" statistics, as if Phillips has not personally celebrated dozens of victories hewn from Votto's on-base-percentage-earning hands. (Not that the Reds do so hot when the subject is not Votto: this very missive could not be completed without the Reds' current manager, Bryan Price, throwing a temper tantrum over having reporters report what's going on with the team.)

The reason Votto draws so many walks is simple, elegant, practical. Really it hardly warrants explaining, but here it is: A pitch too far away from the strike zone is harder to hit, so Votto won't swing at it. You can see this, on a pitch that really misses. Votto is pretty much already shuffling around the batter's box and thinking about the next pitch, all before the errant ball has arrived at home plate. If the pitcher doesn't give Votto any pitches to hit, Votto won't help the pitcher out by taking a hack at a few—he'll stroll down to first base, no biggie.

As un-macho as a walk might feel for your average hitter, you'll also never see a pitcher who's happy to give one up. The only way to possibly retire Votto is to actually send a pitch into the strike zone, the middle of the chessboard, where Votto is waiting to uncoil and clobber the everliving shit out of the baseball. That's an awfully hard chess match to win. Most don't.