Bubble-dwellers everywhere in American culture are prone to make comparisons that become hackneyed over time. In music criticism, someone’s going to liken a songwriter to Dylan. In political punditry, someone’s going to call a bad guy Voldemort. And in baseball, someone’s going to compare Joey Votto to Ted Williams. Like me.
There must be a hundred-thousand people by now who have mentioned the Cincinnati Reds first baseman and the Boston Red Sox legend in the same sentence. There have been numerous profiles of Votto, many of them insightful (and any interview with Votto is insightful), noting that he carried with him a copy of Williams’s The Science of Baseball during his minor league career. Sports Illustrated contributor and Cincinnati Enquirer columnist Paul Daugherty may have been the first person to relay this information to a wide audience in a 2010 story about Votto’s MVP season. It’s been relayed by 99,999 other individuals since.
We all say that Votto, like Williams, fine-tunes his swing the way a mechanic calibrates a stock car. No tweak is small enough to dismiss. Baseball is a numbers game—and something infinitesimal is still a number. If Votto, like Williams, can improve his swing by 0.0001 percent, he will improve his swing by 0.0001 percent. In other industries, we call this sort of behavior “diligence.” In baseball, it’s “insane.” Average hitters fail two out of every three times they bat. Votto, like Williams, labors to reduce that to three out of every five, and hopefully better. Baseball is charming in that it makes Sisyphus seem like just a hard worker.
These comparisons have helped us understand the way Joey Votto approaches the game. But to this point, you haven’t been able to look at him and Williams the same. “[W]hile the game has changed from featuring routine eephus pitches to consistent 100 mph fastballs, Votto has done an admirable job in replicating Williams’ style and production to the best of his modern ability,” wrote SBNation’s Wick Terrell this August.
Votto’s class-A ball manager Billy White put a black point on this “modern” characterization back in 2003: “Ted Williams is dead and there are no Ted Williamses walking around here,” as NBC Sports’s Joe Posnanski recalled.
But in 2017, Ted Williams is stepping into a batter’s box in Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati, Ohio. Votto is no longer impersonating the man: Right now, he is Ted Williams incarnate. Votto has long posted outstanding results—he tied for seventh overall in doubles in 2012 playing 50 fewer games than the guy who finished first—but all this talk of him refining his craft in Williams’s mold has, at age 34, now made him something approximating Williams’s statistical clone.
This season, through 152 games entering Thursday night, Votto had walked 19.2 percent of the time and struck out at an 11.5-percent clip. Nobody does this. Not in the age in which average fastballs are 93 mph and sliders change time zones between the mound and home plate. The typical walk rate in Major League Baseball is about 8 percent; Votto is 11 percentage points better. The average strikeout rate is about 20 percent; Votto is around 8 or 9 percentage points less.
In 2014, the most recent year for which data have been calculated, the MLB-average walk-to-strikeout ratio was 0.37. Votto’s this year is 1.67. He is 57 percent better than the guy who is in second place (1.06).
Votto has 127 walks and 77 strikeouts in 2017; with 9 games to go in the season, it’s safe to say Votto will have more than 130 walks and probably will have fewer than 85 strikeouts. Just 19 players in the history of baseball have pulled this off, including Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, and Williams. It’s happened only 10 times since 1960. Barry Bonds is responsible for four of them. This is an anomaly in any year. It’s been near-impossible in the last six decades.
Votto’s statistics on the balls he’s put in play are anomalous, too—because for him to have a .317 batting average and .578 slugging percentage appears unlucky. Very, in fact, if you look at the last half-decade and exclude the time he was just getting used to this professional baseball thing. Joey Votto, who possessed an on-base-plus-slugging percentage (OPS) of 1.031 entering Thursday, second in baseball by a measly 0.003, looks to have been jobbed.
In this age of advanced stats, there is one called BABIP, or batting average on balls in play. It’s simple enough: It measures how often a ball put in the field of play results in a hit. (As such, home runs do not count.) It’s a meaningful number for measuring expected outcomes—the Major League average BABIP is about .300 every year, and when you consider an individual player’s BABIP and strikeout rate as a whole, you get an idea of how he should be producing. For a player who strikes out a ton and has a BABIP of .400, you know to expect his batting average to decline. For a player who strikes out a little and has a BABIP of .220, you expect better things to come. Excellent players go through stretches like the latter all the time; it’s a way to tell they may be getting unlucky instead of playing poorly.
For his career, Votto has averaged an outstanding .353 BABIP. Players who hit the ball hard tend to produce a similar outcome, since batters that wallop pitches with more frequency tend to have more hits. As measured by the website Fangraphs, the percentage of balls Votto has struck with “hard speed,” “medium speed,” and “soft speed” this season are almost exactly in line with his career averages—his hard hit rate, 36.9 percent, is identical. Yet his BABIP is .317, almost 40 batting average points off his historical norm, and about 50 off his last three full seasons—a significant difference. This could be attributable to a few factors: Two are that Votto is hitting a career-high rate of fly balls and a bit fewer line drives. Fly balls tend to be hits a little less frequently than ground balls and much less frequently than line drives. But going off history, it just as easily could be the case that a few balls which normally would evade defenders haven’t this season.
Since this is a thought experiment, if you adjust Votto’s BABIP upward to .360—the low end of what he’s posted while healthy since 2012, and he’s played every game this year—he would have 19 extra hits this season. If you distribute those hits proportionally to the percentages of singles, doubles, and triples he’s struck in 2017, his new batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage would be:
.353/.495/.622.
This is preposterous.
Since the dawn of baseball, five players posted these numbers for a full season, four of whom never took a steroid.
Rogers Hornsby. Mickey Mantle. Babe Ruth.
And Ted Williams, who might as well be wearing #19 in the Queen City.
