Some 20 minutes earlier, he knocked on the door of Reds manager David Bell’s Milwaukee hotel room, summoned there by text. 25, 2020, and he couldn’t stop asking himself that question. (They sit four games behind the Cardinals.) His teammates sport T-shirts that read VOTTO STILL BANGS. 389/.593/1.000 with three home runs over the past week. He is doing his best to will the Reds to a wild-card berth, hitting. He has collected his 300th home run, 1,000th RBI and 2,000th hit. His 33 dingers, including two on Monday, are four short of his career high. In July, he became the eighth player ever to homer in seven straight games. Now, two weeks past his 38th birthday and with less than two weeks to go in the season, he is unspooling his best offensive year since then. Votto won the National League MVP award in 2010 and came two down-ballot votes from winning it again in ’17.
All that precision has made for a very valuable hitter: Since the Reds’ first baseman debuted in ’07, only Mike Trout and Robinson Canó have accrued more WAR. From 2010 through ’14, Votto infield pop-ups were rarer than perfect games. He led the league in on-base percentage seven times in his first 10 full seasons.
