Joey Votto Is Still A Star

Once considered a player worthy of a massive $225 million contract extension, Joey Votto has clearly seen his popularity drop considerably among the Cincinnati Reds faithful. A quick look recently at a popular online forum for Reds fans revealed regular complaints about the hitter Votto “used to be,” that he’s “declining,” that he’s “no longer a run producer,” and that he’s massively, incredibly overpaid.

Reds radio announcer Marty Brennaman recentlystoked the fires by suggesting that if Votto leads the league in on-base percentage in 2015, the team would somehow “be in deep trouble.”

OK, so that overpaid part might be valid — Votto is still due $213 million through his age-39 season — and you can understand the frustration to some extent, considering he hit only six homers last year and didn’t take the field after July 5 because of a pair of quad injuries. At 31, and with three serious leg injuries in the past three years on his résumé, Votto has probably put his MVP candidate days behind him.

But there’s a big difference between “probably not worth the money” and somehow being a detriment to the Reds’ hopes. Reports of Votto’s demise are painfully premature; the seemingly forgotten superstar can certainly be good again in 2015, but he really never stopped being good.

Votto’s 2014 campaign was easily the worst year of his career by almost every measure. Due to the limited playing time, his counting stats all checked in as career lows and his wRC+ of 128 was his worst since his 2008 rookie season. But here’s the thing: Votto’s “bad year” was still really, really good.

To put his wRC+ number in context, consider that Hunter Pence didn’t make it to a 128 wRC+ last year. Neither did Alex Gordon or Kyle Seager or Pablo Sandoval or Matt Carpenter or NL batting champion Justin Morneau. Granted, those players made it through full seasons, whereas Votto played in just 62 games, but even an injured, diminished Votto — one clearly trying to play through pain — was still very valuable when he was on the field. Valuable enough that, per Baseball-Reference, if the Reds had nine 2014 Vottos for a full season and merely league-average pitching and fielding, Cincinnati would have won 106 games.

If it doesn’t seem that way, it’s because Votto set huge expectations in the traditional counting stats by hitting 37 homers and driving in 113 runs in 2010, and he hasn’t come close to either since. Of course, most of baseball knows better than to look at RBIs as a measure of a hitter’s worth — it’s a team stat, not an individual one — and the Reds have had increasing difficulty merely getting men on base to be driven in. Last year, only the Mariners and historically awful Padres had worse non-pitcher OBP than the Reds, and that includes Votto’s partial-season .390.

Put another way, if Votto is driving in fewer runners, that’s largely because fewer opportunities exist for him. I created a quick “baserunners per plate appearance” stat to show what Votto has been working with. This is imperfect because, for example, it doesn’t differentiate between a runner on first and one on third, but it’s a quick-and-dirty way to see what the batters in front of Votto have done. The results are to the right.

The differences in those fractions might not seem like a lot, but realize what it means over the course of a full season. The difference between 0.48 and 0.60 in 700 plate appearances is a full 84 more runners on base, waiting to be driven in. It has been a steady decline in front of Votto, with the exception being a blip back up in 2013. It’s not hard at all to explain the 2013 blip; that was the one year the Reds had Shin-Soo Choo and his .423 OBP sandwiched between years from guys like Drew Stubbs (.277 OBP in 2012) and Billy Hamilton (.292 in 2014) failing to set the table atop the lineup.

While that explains a good deal of that declining RBI total, it doesn’t completely excuse Votto either. After all, one good way to drive in a run without needing your teammates is to hit homers, and Votto seemingly hasn’t hit for as much power as he used to. Part of it is simply that his 37-homer 2010 campaign was unsustainable, requiring a home run-per-fly ball rate of 25 percent, which ranks as one of the 10 highest marks of the past five years, wildly out of line with Votto’s career rate of 18.3. He has had a HR/FB mark in that 18 percent range four times, and each of those four times came with home run marks from 24 to 29. That’s the hitter he is, and still can be.

What he’s also done is limit the negative outcomes, and in this case that means avoiding the worst thing that can happen when a hitter puts bat to ball: a popup. It’s the lowest-reward play in the game, turning into a near-certain out. Here’s the full list of players who have popped upless than 1 percent of the time since 2010:

1) Joey Votto, 0.7 percent

That’s all. And since we’re focusing on what he has done more recently, note that even in 2014 that didn’t change that much, rising to just 1.8 percent. Note also that with the understanding that a player goes to the plate with the intention of not making an out, here’s the list of players who have made outs fewer than 60 percent of the time since 2010:

1) Joey Votto, .430 OBP
2) Miguel Cabrera, .414 OBP

Even in his down year, only five players topped Votto’s 2014 OBP of .390. For all the complaints about Votto being “too passive,” don’t forget that there’s an indisputable relationship between just getting on base and scoring runs.

For example, the 2013 Reds had the NL’s highest walk rate and scored the third-most runs in the league. The 2014 Reds had the NL’s third-lowest walk rate and scored the third-fewest runs. They were exactly middle of the pack in homers both years. Guess which stat has a bigger influence on run-scoring? This is warmed-over territory, yet it needs to be said. Making money doesn’t mean you need to hit homers, it means you need to produce, and Votto has consistently done so.

Unsurprisingly, the projection systems love Votto for 2015. Steamer sees a 143 wRC+, the ninth-best mark in the game, despite just 19 homers. ZiPS sees 15 homers and similar overall production. These don’t seem unrealistic considering that Votto still managed to produce last season at less than 100 percent health and that by the time Opening Day rolls around he’ll have had approximately nine months of rest. The gaudy power numbers are probably gone forever at his age, but the value is not.

Imagine being so good that you can put up a valuable (partial) season without healthy legs, then imagine being so underappreciated that your own fan base seems to think you did something wrong. Votto will almost certainly never escape the “overpaid” label, not unfairly, but if and when the Reds struggle this year, it’s not going to be because of him. He’ll still be among their best players, and with even moderately improved health, he’ll again be one of the best anywhere.