BUFFALO, N.Y. — Toward the end of the Buffalo Bisons’ daily game-review meeting, held in Sahlen Field’s home dugout on a grey and muggy Thursday, manager Casey Candaele called on Joey Votto and handed him the floor. The 40-year-old potential Hall of Famer stood up and paced from one end of the bench to the other, regaling his captivated triple-A teammates before delivering a punch line that cracked everyone up.
It was exactly the type of exchange the veteran skipper has been encouraging his players to create with Votto since his arrival. “If I’m a young player and I don’t sit down and talk to him, I’m kind of an idiot,” said Candaele. “Having him there talking about things in the game that he’s experienced, you can’t get better than that.”
Tidbit of knowledge paid forward and delivered in this instance, the gathering broke up and off the players went to tackle their day.
“I feel like that’s part of the baseball community,” Votto said. “I remember once getting called into the office in Atlanta when Dusty Baker was manager of the Reds, and he called in his friend and former teammate Hank Aaron. It’s the same sort of thing. I’m by no means Hank Aaron, but from one of the greatest players on down, we share amongst each other. We try to learn from one another. We try to make the game better. You learn from experience, of course, but you can avoid some pitfalls by learning from people that have taken those challenges on before.”
In that way, Votto is pouring into those around him even as he works through the challenge he’s taken on this season — trying to get back to the big-leagues with the Toronto Blue Jays.
When he signed a minor-league deal, with the aim of extending his career with his hometown team back on March 9, he didn’t imagine that five months later he’d still be trying to lock down his swing, his timing and his stamina in the minors. A homer on the first Grapefruit League pitch he saw March 17 seemed to portend good things. But he rolled his right ankle stepping on a bat in the dugout immediately after, did far more damage than he realized and all of a sudden it’s August, a week in at triple-A and so much ground to cover.
As a result, his pursuit has been “challenging in ways that I didn’t expect.”
“I didn’t expect the recovery to take this long. I thought that I would be with the team sometime in April. I thought that I would be home more. But that doesn’t mean that I’ve hated the experience. And it’s not done yet,” he continued. “It’s been a great experience in that it’s much different than what I’m used to. I’ve been a professional for a while now and I’ve been used to the major-league routine. And between not getting signed in the off-season, no longer playing with a team, getting injured in spring and trying to work my way back, it’s been a bit of a shock to my system. But I figured out ways to adjust and to find the good and it’s been great.”
For a six-time all-star and 2010 National League MVP with 2,135 hits and a batting line of .294/.409/.511 across 17 seasons with the Reds, the shocks to overcome included four months in a Florida hotel room as he recovered from a couple of different setbacks with his ankle.
Having gone through August 2022 surgery to repair rotator cuff and biceps tears in his left shoulder and recovering to play 65 games last year, the grind of rehabilitation wasn’t unfamiliar.
This, though, was different as “it took a while before I could even consistently go out for walks” and “I had to spend a lot of time in my hotel room, with my legs propped up.”
That forced him to learn some “patience cues” because “there were certainly times where I was frustrated and sad and I was impatient and I felt like it wasn’t fair.”
He’d reset by reminding himself of “how lucky I am that I have something I want to do” and that the pursuit of playing for the Blue Jays is “something that I’ve been excited about, and I’ve targeted, and that there hasn’t been a single day where I wanted to stop the process, where I wanted to just kind of call it.”
“That feels good to me,” he continued. “That tells me that I’m doing the right thing, and it tells me that the idea of playing in Toronto, seeing my family, playing for the Blue Jays, the team that I grew up cheering for, is a goal that wasn’t just kind of a flash. It’s something that I’ve wanted since I signed and yeah, I’m excited about that potentially happening.”
Still, Votto is fully cognizant of what he described as a big gap between where he is at the plate and where he wants to be. Even after a 1-for-4 outing Thursday in his sixth game with the Bisons, his first time starting at first base on back-to-back days, he’s only at 68 plate appearances this year between the Florida Complex League, low-A Dunedin and Buffalo.
To try and make up for the reps he lost, he’s deliberate and intent with each swing during batting practice, watching the trajectory of the ball off the bat and making adjustments as necessary. At one point, Votto asked Bisons hitting coach Ryan Long to send a pitch from the breaking ball machine through just so he could track the movement, identify a swing path and attack the next offering. A series of line drives followed.
The current focus is building up not only his speed and strength but also the endurance in both areas, because “that can take a dip pretty quickly if you don’t have the stamina,” he explained.
“I have to keep chipping away at the volume” Votto added. “The major-league day is hard and you do it every day. That doesn’t mean I expect to play every day. It’s just you have to be prepared to play every day.”
At the same time, to avoid cheating himself and his process, he refuses look too far beyond that.
The Reds, for instance, visit Toronto for a three-game series beginning Aug. 19 and wouldn’t that be an intriguing time for him to make his Blue Jays debut. But Votto won’t even engage the possibility — “I’m not thinking about that. I’m in the Toronto Blue Jays organization. I’m a Buffalo Bison. I’m only thinking about performing well, so I can help the team like a major-league player,” he said. And later, he punts a question about how much longer he wants to keep going, regardless of how all this plays out, saying “I’m day-to-day.”
“I’m not thinking about next year,” Votto added. “I have my moments, but I just continue to remind myself, just worry about today, dude.
“This is odd for me to say as I prepare to play a triple-A game — my objective is to get to a place where I can thrive at the major-league level,” he continued. “That’s really it. That’s all I’ve ever been about in my career. This is a beautiful game. I love the sport. But it’s not a fun game unless you’re doing your job. I’d really like the next time I put a major-league uniform on to be confident that I am a capable player, that I’m able to do my job, able to perform well, able to give the fans their money’s worth. And that’s really all I’m thinking about.”
Rightly so, as that’s the path before Votto, who remains determined to walk it, focused on each step as much as the ultimate destination.