Zach Buchanan

zbuchanan@enquirer.com

It was an interesting question to ask Joey Votto even before he started hitting home runs at an advanced pace. The Cincinnati Reds first baseman has seven homers through his first 22 games, giving him a home run rate of 7.5 percent. It’s incredibly early – there’s little chance Votto finishes the year with a .238 average and .330 on-base percentage – but he’s on pace for 51 long balls.

Other players have sold out for power by making changes to their swing, engineering an uppercut stroke that maximizes fly balls. The 33-year-old Votto does not belong to that club, and offered his opinions on the wave of swing-changers before he went on his recent run of hitting four home runs in the span of nine games.

He sees the swing-change benefit for some players – athletic hitters with natural power who have yet to really tap into it. J.D. Martinez, A.J. Pollock and Mitch Haniger all have enjoyed success with the “Groundballs Suck” approach. But Votto worries that it’s a fad, and that less successful players will waste their careers chasing a swing that works only for a select few.

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“Where I get concerned is the guys that make this attempt and burn out too much of their time and don’t get a chance to be their best selves, and either don’t make it to the big leagues or don’t perform their best in the big leagues because they’re always attempting this new style of hitting,” Votto said. “I see it with a lot of guys. Everyone tells the good stories, but there’s a lot of s—ty stories of guys who are wasting their time trying things.”

As far as Votto is concerned, the game moves too quickly for any kind of inefficiency to be exposed for long. The movement to maximize fly balls has been seen as one of those evolutions. With the strike zone moving lower and lower in recent seasons, pitchers have been given the low strike more often. Hitters with an uppercut swing – instead of the chop-down approach – are better positioned to hit the low pitch.

But baseball minds have already begun working on how to neutralize the fly ball devotees. Some say pitchers should start pitching up in the zone, an area that’s hard to reach with an uppercut swing. Votto doesn’t know what the adjustment will be, but he’s sure it will happen.

“There’s always going to be reactions, there’s always going to be the cat-and-mouse,” he said. “Guys will burn them and they’ll make an adjustment and figure out the holes and then go from there.”

Votto’s personal goal is not to hit fly balls, but to hit whatever he wants whenever he wants to hit it. To accomplish that, he’s had to fight against his natural swing that would have made him a model for the uppercut swing movement.

When Votto first entered pro baseball after being drafted in 2002, he had a more prototypical left-handed swing. It cut upward through the zone and pulled the ball to right and right-center. Plenty have succeeded with such an attack, and many consider left-handed swings to be prettier than the righty versions.

Not Votto. To model his swing, he looks more at right-handed hitters. They have a more level swing plane, something he’s strived to achieve. If he’s not a player who will wind up with 500 home runs – and Votto will fall short by a good amount – he felt his natural swing wouldn’t help him over time.

“My favorite hitter of all time is Barry Bonds, but I can’t relate to him,” Votto said. “A pull, flyball hitter that hit a lot of home runs. I’m not in that mold.”

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Votto wants to be adaptable, to be whatever hitter he has to be in the moment. Sometimes that means an uppercut swing and a ball pulled to right-center. Sometimes he’ll look like a swing-changer despite his protestations otherwise, just as some have labeled Mike Trout. But when Votto watches Trout, he sees a guy “who can do absolutely anything he wants,” who “at all times (has) all options.”

He wants to be a hitter without weaknesses, which is at odds with selling out for any one type of batted ball. Sometimes, a groundball is better. Sometimes, he has to hit the fastball up and in.

“I wanted to become the ultimate, be able to be unpitchable, indefensible as a younger player,” Votto said. “That’s been my career’s work.”

Votto knows he can’t do some of the things he did when he won the National League MVP in 2010. Back then, he felt he had more bat speed and more natural power. He could take more chances, and risk more whiffs. That luxury has evaporated with age.

Yet, his last two full seasons arguably have been the most productive two-year stretch in his career. In that span, he hit .320/.447/.546 and had an OPS+ of 167, second only to Trout. He may not be at his most powerful now, but is he at his most complete?

“Yeah,” he said, “I think so.”