It was an Uber drive to the Rogers Centre in Toronto on August 21 that emotionally sealed the envelope of Joey Votto’s baseball career.
He was playing for the Buffalo Bisons, and he was on his way to the stadium in Toronto to see his old Cincinnati Reds teammates. He had just posted on Instagram that he was retiring from baseball.
“Are you a player?” the Uber driver asked.
“No,” replied Votto.
Votto, and every Toronto Blue Jays fan alive, was hoping the Jays would call Votto up for that series in the Dome against the Reds. It’s a stretch to say Votto’s quest to make his hometown team drove a wedge between Canadian and American baseball worlds. Votto, beloved everywhere, wanted to end his career playing for the team he grew up loving. Reds fans wanted him to be one of the few superstars to play his entire career with one team. To them, he would be their Chipper Jones, or Tony Gwynn, or Kirby Puckett. They didn’t want him to play anywhere else, even if Toronto is his hometown team.
As the only person he @JoeyVotto follows on here, I speak for everyone by saying congratulations. Very few ball players have had the class, respect, and success that you did. I’ll retweet some thanks and well wishes for the next hour or two to fill his barren timeline with love. pic.twitter.com/TQcQBbWdJk
— Devin Mesoraco (@DMesoraco) August 22, 2024
Journey to the Majors
Joey Votto’s journey to the Major Leagues is as common as it is unusual.
He grew up in a city that loved sports. He was nine years old when the Toronto Blue Jays won the 1992 World Series. He was 10 – the perfect age – when Joe Carter hit his famous walk-off home run to win the 1993 World Series.
“That was a big moment for me, and for my family,” he said in an interview in 2012. By the time we interviewed him, he had already won an MVP award and was in the third of his six All-Star seasons.
“Our family loved baseball,” he said. “I played catch with my father a lot and he collected baseball cards – that was something we did together. When the Jays one of the World Series and we celebrated, especially after the Joe Carter home run, that was one of the happiest moments of my childhood, and we celebrated as a family.”
Like his father, Votto also loved collecting cards. However, it was not baseball cards that got him hooked, or even hockey cards, as you would expect in Toronto especially when the Leafs were in the midst of booming popularity with stars like Wendel Clark and Doug Gilmour at their peak.
“I used to play Magic: The Gathering with my friends at school,” he said. “We would play it on the bus. It was a fun thing to do, and it got me into collecting. I think when I realized that some cards were rare and worth something I got more serious about it.”
As Votto went through high school and became a better and better baseball player, there were always questions about whether or not he would be good enough to play against better pitching and better competition. He was a third baseman when he was first scouted.
Jim Bowden, who was the Reds’ General Manager at the time, talked about drafting Votto on MLN Network Radio on Sirius XM earlier this week. He said that not everyone was high on Votto, who was expected to be selected around the 10th round. He said Votto had a pure swing, and he was afraid that he would not be available in the second round.
But many of the other teams saw Votto as a Canadian kid playing against low-level competition who hits with an aluminum bat against pitchers who throw 75 mph fastballs. He was too much of a risk.
Bowden explained that they were planning on taking Votto with the 44th overall pick. They knew the Yankees wanted him as well. They got him in the second round. Bowden knew that Votto was not a good enough catcher defensively to play in the Major Leagues. He pushed a move to first base.
“We knew Votto could really hit, knew he had a chance to win a batting title someday,” Bowden explained in an MLB.com article. “We didn’t know he’d be an MVP, but I’ll never forget calling our development people and Minor League manager and telling them to scrap his catching and let him play first base to just hit, because I said he’d get to the big leagues a lot quicker at first base. It was too much work to make him an adequate defensive catcher, and we couldn’t waste his impact bat in the Majors. I got a lot of pushback at the time, a lot of thank yous years later.
“Votto lived up to expectations with the bat and surpassed them defensively at first base. I love Joey. I never thought when I left Cincinnati 16 years ago that he’d still be playing. Congrats to him on what has been a Hall of Fame-worthy consideration run.”
Votto’s RC: 2002 vs. 2008
The hobby has generally referred to Votto’s 2002 Bowman cards as his rookie cards. He has a 2002 Bowman Draft Chrome and paper version of the card. A third Votto rookie card from 2002 is in the Topps 206 set. This set is inspired by the famous T-206 tobacco set issued between 1909 and 1911. The 2002 set has traditional 3.5” by 2.5” cards, though the parallels are the smaller tobacco card-sized cards.
Until 2006, Topps was allowed to use draft picks, minor leaguers and prospects in Major League sets. After 2006, they had to wait until the player played in his first game to appear in the set. The player’s cards would now get an RC designation. Players in Bowman sets get a First Bowman Card designation.
Votto’s breakthrough into the Majors straddled that timeline. He was a September call-up in 2007 and made his Major League Debut then. His 2008 Topps and Upper Deck issues have the new RC designation as rookie cards, even though he had been in two sets in 2002.
Despite the designation on the 2008 cards, the hobby has always considered the 2002 cards his rookie cards.
“It was really exciting to be on a baseball card for the first time,” Votto said in our 2012 interview. “When I saw myself on a card for the first time, it was a big deal. When they took the picture, I was only 18 years old and I was in the Gulf Coast Rookie League. We signed autographs but not a lot of them. We were usually given baseballs to sign. But I remember the first time someone handed me a Bowman Chrome card to autograph for the first time. It was one of those moments you never forget. It felt like I had made it.”
Votto said that his father, who has since passed away, was building a collection of every Joe Votto card out there.
“He’s a big collector,” Votto said in 2012. “He is building a really good collection, and he is always asking me to send him some cards when I am able to get them. He also asks me to sign some cards and send them to him so that he can give them away to friends or members of the family. He’s really into it, and it’s fun when I go home and I can see the collection and go through it with him.”
The first cards that Votto signed to go onto a product were in 2004 Bowman Signs of the Future. Most of his signatures are in blue, while there are 25 that were signed with red ink.
“I received the cards with the pens and the instructions,” he said. “Being a collector, I understood how important it was to follow the instructions and get it right. Signing cards is part of the deal when you become a pro. I always liked signing because you know that every card you sign will end up with a collector or a fan or a kid. It’s more than just signing a card. Each autograph creates a special moment and a special collectible for the person who pulls it.”
Votto has a minor league autographed card from 2004, as he signed for the 2004 Just Prospects set. He also signed cards for the 2006 Tri-Star Farmhands set.
As time goes on, there will still be multitudes of Joey Votto cards produced. There will be autographs and game-used relics on cards for years to come.
And although he never fulfilled his childhood dream of playing for the Toronto Blue Jays, at least his 2024 Topps Chrome card shows him in the uniform of the team he grew up loving.
If only his father could have been around to have that card.
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