How Joey Votto should be romantic about baseball: Wrong Answers Only Wednesday!!
Back to the rank and bile in Q-and-A form. In this edition, we'll talk about how Kirk Cousins really threaded the needle with fan cynicism, and have some other responses to Totally Real Questions.
A comp with another Cincinnati Reds great seems unfair when it comes to Joey Votto taking a flier with the Toronto Blue Jays.
Perhaps this came up since this is a year that ends in “4,” and a forthcoming biography of a certain exiled Hit King landed in the inbox recently. I do not want to compare Joey Votto to Pete Rose, since it appears people inside and outside of baseball actually like Joey Votto. It is reliably verified that Votto clears sport’s Do Not Be a Degen low bar. But, hey, both came up with Cinci and played there for more than 15 seasons, swung from the left side, and won the true batting title multiple times.1
In 1984, any port in a shameless pursuit of a prestigious record would do for an about-to-be-43 Pete Rose. The season prior, he had sucked with the Philadelphia Phillies, and still needed about 200 hits to surpass Ty Cobb.2 He needed to play, and his agent Reuven Katz averred, “Montréal is where he really wants to be.”
Yeah, sure. Rose, by the numbers, was replacement-level for his partial season with the Expos, mostly because he could still get on base at an OK rate.3 Is that the ceiling with Joey Votto entering his forty-first summer? That’s for real journos to project.
On to the totes-real questions.
What am I missing? Why did my B.S. detector ping lightly when Joey Votto said he wanted to play in Toronto “since he was wearing a Blue Jays bib,” since he spent twenty-two flippin’ seasons in the Cincinnati Reds organization?
— S.T., Lyons Brook, N.S.
Whelp, Votto would know, and you would know, and every comms pro would know. An athlete has more take-home pay if they reside primarily in Ohio or Kentucky than if they live mostly in Ontario.4
Votto, and whoever advises him, were trying to be romantic about baseball, just like John Tavares with that photo of his childhood bedsheets. The fact that Tavares is having problems with the revenuers you would not give to Cousin Merle is proof why Joey Votto did not try to play in Toronto.
Here is how to be romantic about baseball in a way pitched to adults. It is publicly available that Joey Votto earned more than a quarter-billion dollars in salary across 17 seasons with Cincinnati. He could go out on that, but he is willing, at 40 years old, to start over, and if that does not make a Xennial, then what does? So here is another crack at it, free of charge:
My heart is very full. It excites me to be in a hotel room in Florida, to just take a shuttle or Uber to the ballpark, and be a minor-league player with an unknown number just trying my very best to make a team. It invigorates me. It’s what I feel I’ve been about since I signed in 2002 and it brings me great joy….I just want to work and I want to compete and I want to fit in. I want to get along with guys, I want to be liked and I want to represent myself, my family, and my country well. And this is the perfect opportunity.
You’re welcome, Joey. Plan the parade in November.
Sags, I presume you will shortly invent a program for ’90s References Disorder, and be its first graduate. When do you know your friend is trying too hard to force a Norm Macdonald joke?
— F.C., Southampton, Ont.
Let me think about that. I’m distracted because Rolling Stone reported that Beyoncé is the first Black woman to top the Hot Country Songs list; when reached for comment Beyoncé played it off by, stating ‘it wasn’t that hard when the competition is mostly mediocre white guys who can’t hang on to a job, a girlfriend, a truck, or a dog.’
As a Vikings fan, what are you going to miss about Kirk Cousins, who signed with the Atlanta Falcons?
— BG, Fort McMurray, Alta.
The way Captain Kirk could just thread the needle between two conflicting forms of fan cynicism. Cousins has become megarich by being the National Football League quarterback whose name is code for “above average ain’t good enough.”
The one form of cynicism, the one that doesn’t do anything, teems with confirmation bias. It predicts failure for anything short of the ultimate goal, and then goes, “Ha! I knew we wouldn’t win.” You get that with Kirk Cousins. He passes for an interception-free 350 yards in a 34-33 defeat, and somehow it is his fault.
But my kind of cynicism is cheeky and fun. I follow only two major pro teams anymore, the NFL Vikings and the Blue Jays. And I watch them the same way one would watch a very mid comedy series, with some Lowered Expectations. Are they at least entertaining? Are there some good laughs when patterns of poor play recur? I don’t need to see them win it all, but in a world of quiet desperation, I just need to see them, and know the organization isn’t doing crimes.
Why don’t you watch the NCAA men’s basketball championship anymore? It’s March Madness, my man!
— A.R., Lockport, N.Y.
Anonymous, unsalaried, non-union players; largely faceless teams; and coaches who have recruiting networks but can hardly coach. Thanks to NCAA greed, and the power of mass persuasion, their tentpole event is played on a temporary court laid down in a football stadium, so shooters’ depth perception is thrown off. No thanks.
What constructive critiques does your men’s-only feminist group have for the PWHL?
— Z.W., Chicago
Here at Mr. F, aka Mansplaining Radical Feminism, we are working to gently nudge polemical pucks in deep.5 It has been a challenge.
I like the league! Love learning about new players who might have gone unnoticed outside of Canada-U.S. games,
In Year 1, the P-Dub is offering up-tempo hockey, a sustainable level of scheduling, and some good gameplay tweaks. It keeps expanding the proof-of-concept. It has the spirit of the original World Hockey Association. It is made by Americans with access to global capital and ‘the vision thing’ collaborating with Canadian sportspeople, knowing each has something the other could never hope to buy. Somewhere, Wild Bill Hunter smiles.
Criticisms? Mild, around-the-margins stuff that points up even in a women’s league, sports ain’t that progressive.
Players participated in a recent feature, on our public broadcaster no less, slotting players onto a women’s hockey Mount Rushmore.
No, no, no! This could be pointed out 10 times a week; sorry to single out one slip-up. That is one content-mill template that must go, even if it was unintentional. Mount Rushmore is as racist and colonialist as it gets; “a monument to white colonizers carved by a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer into land stolen from us by the U.S. government in 1877.” Who knows where using it to SPARK SPORTZ DEBATEZ started, but we know we can end it in 15 seconds.
So yeah, lose that one.
Meantime, a small note to PWHL Ottawa. The women’s basketball Carleton Ravens, won their second national championship in a row on Sunday. Neither the PWHL Ottawa, or the Senators, made a congratulatory post. The men’s Ravens, though, have been adulated at hockey games after their national titles.
The U Sports championship game ended after 11:30 p.m. EDT on a Sunday night. But still…
I do like this league. Love that, out of only six teams, one has purple in its identity and another has a deep green.
How choked are you to not have come up with calling Pierre Poilievre “Milhouse”?
— T.J., Winona, Ont.
Not at all; going after the looks or mien of any person, least of all He Who Shall Not Be Named, is such low-hanging fruit.
Besides, it just needs to be said: a rage-farming, racist-courting, Russia-sympathizing hate-mongering reply bro is not prime ministerial. Especially right now.
Canada does have a leadership vacuum. It is understandable why people might get seduced by someone who campaigns incessantly, on their dime. We need to be organizing for the good figurative wars: adapting to the climate crisis and stopping the rich from acting like they can do anything, absent of consequences.
He Who Shall Not Be Named wants to escalate both of those existential threats. There is no need of another plastic strongman without policy chops whose team acts like a 14-year-old boy when overreacting to a legit criticism from former PM Kim Campbell. Whom, by the way, was the defence minister and justice minister when cabinet autonomy and Red Tories still existed.
On principle, I have to vote for the party that acts the least in bad faith. Whoops, could not say that. I could never be a candidate. I would blurt out that Canadians would vote for anyone as long as they could keep their 3,000-sq-ft houses, sprawling suburbs, drive-everywhere car culture, and Costco runs. I punted on all of that when the acceptance letter to journalism school arrived in 2001.
Being a reliable ABC voter is good distancing. Lord Harper muddied our polity for all time with shady trade deals that were time-released poison pills, and playing to the perma-aggrieved 25 percent of the population. He still runs that party, too.
The Brian Mulroney big-tent party took some solid cuts. But his Blue Team fomented “disaster among Indigenous relations” by mishandling the Kanesatake Resistance. That haunts us still.
Joe Clark could not count his MPs in a minority Parliament in 1980. John Diefenbaker was a disaster at governance, and canceling the Avro Arrow is a deal-breaker in the history books.
Oh, but maybe it could be different? With a leader and party who play footsy with authoritarianism, fascism, and bigotry? When a person shows you who they are, believe them. I’m scared people do and decided that is who they want.
No worries; circular logicians are standing by to talk us into it. They should try explaining most of Canada is governed by provinces, and look what is happening there.6
Now that you mention it, though, he does look like Milhouse from The Simpsons. With or without the glasses.
I know you follow baseball, especially the AL East. When will Lucas Giolito, who is out for the season recovering from season-ending elbow surgery on March 12, truly feel like part of the Boston Red Sox pitching staff?
— C.F., Mount Pearl, N.L.
That happened on March 12, when Lucas Giolito had season-ending elbow surgery.
Small note
Please never take anything I say more than 80 percent seriously. Reminder, further venting is available on Substack notes since Facebook prohibits Canadians from sharing news content.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
March 11-13
Hamilton, Ont.
First in on-base percentage, not batting percentage. Why be governed by what Henry Chadwick thought about statistics a century and a half ago?
Again, why? A career milestone in hits is a nice validation of an MLB player’s longevity. But it’s an outdated counting stat, otherwise.
OPS : millennials :: batting average : Boomers when it comes to poor metrics. If you keep using them, I am going to have to point at Pete. On-base percentage addresses whether a player is good at not burning one of their team’s 27 offensive outs. Weighted on-base percentage reflects how frequently they obtained extra bases through hitting a double, home run, or triple.
I have to quote the writer Scott Raab, who grew up in Cleveland. During a magazine profile of Rose written in the late 1990s, Raab described Cincinnati as, “a fussy, gooberous river burg, half (slur for Germans) and half hillbilly, which is essentially the capital of northern Kentucky.”
Arrested Development, Season 3 Episode 5.
See Max Fawcett, “The provinces are trying to break Canada,” National Observer, Feb. 1, 2024.