Cincinnati Reds' Joey Votto determined to be great - ESPN

Votto and many others, including pitcher Mike Leake, just completed a complete dismantling of the Giants pitching staff over the course of the last four games. This blast for ESPN's past helps to explain how he did it, borrowing some tidbits from past greats like Ted Williams and one Barry Lamar Bonds.


from ESPN:
Cincinnati Reds' Joey Votto determined to be great - ESPN:

"My favorite ability in a player is the combination of aggressiveness and patience," Votto said. "I think it's very difficult to have fewer opportunities to have success and still execute. My favorite player was Barry Bonds, and he got so few opportunities.

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Votto has committed large chunks of Ted Williams' book "The Science of Hitting" to memory and frequently been mentioned in the same breath with Larry Walker as an accomplished hitter with Canadian roots. But his baseball muse is a hard-charging, Ray Fosse-steamrolling, Prince Valiant-haircut-wearing, malapropism-dropping, autograph-hawking pariah with a tenacious approach from both sides of the plate.

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Choo has used Votto as a major resource in his acclimation to the National League. If he's not picking Votto's brain on the pitcher he's about to face, he's eyeballing Votto's at-bats from the dugout or the basepaths for subtle tips on how to approach different situations.

Once they're in the box, the fellow Reds are similarly methodical with their routines. As Choo explains, he wipes his mind clear and basically hits the "re-set'' button before every pitch.

"I can't tell you my approach for your article, but I have a plan,'' he said with all due politeness.

It always comes back to the Ted Williams mantra of getting a good pitch to hit. Votto swings at the first pitch 29.3 percent of the time, which ranks 62nd out of 171 big league hitters and is well above the MLB average of 26.4 percent. But he and Choo both prefer to linger in the box under the theory that every take, swing and snippet of information collected helps tilt the pendulum in their favor. Choo ranks 20th in the majors with 4.19 pitches per plate appearance, while Votto is 22nd at 4.17.

Their most impressive attribute is the ability to lay off sliders in the dirt, fastballs above the letters and other pitches that most hitters find too tantalizing to ignore and too nasty to put in play with authority. Choo has the fourth lowest "chase rate" in the majors at 16.9 percent, and Votto ranks 13th at 18.6 percent.