Joey Votto's well-known as perhaps the smartest, most insightful and reflective hitter in the major leagues (and I added the qualifier because there are a bunch of articulate, obviously intelligent pitchers; but not nearly so many hitters).
Does this guy look like an intellectual, though?
Because it's Votto and not just your run-of-the-mill hothead (or "redass," as hotheads are known, or used to be known, in baseball), let's dig into this incident a little...
Here's the conversation in the booth:
Thom Brennaman: "Fastball is strike two on the outside corner. This is one of those nights, seemingly Votto has disagreed with just about every pitch that has been called a strike, and he has good reason to disagree, according to FoxTrax there.
"Votto's been thrown out of the game!"
Jeff Brantley: "Well this has been going on all night, and there has been a running conversation with Votto; he is awfully awfully upset."
Going on all night?
Votto struck out in the first inning. According to BrookBaseball's PITCHf/x tool, the three balls were outside the strike zone and the two called strikes were inside the strike zone. And none of the pitches were particularly close.
Votto struck out again in the fourth inning. There was just one called strike and it was borderline ... but a batter really can't complain much about a borderline, 50/50 call.
In the seventh, Votto ripped the first pitch he saw for an automatic double.
So just to review, heading into his fourth plate appearance, Votto had seen just one borderline pitch in the whole game. So if he'd been complaining before the eighth inning, he'd been complaining without any objectively reasonable justification.
Those first three at-bats came against J. A. Happ. In the eighth, Votto stepped to the plate against Tony Watson, whose first pitch was well inside. Watson's second pitch was well inside the strike zone, and Votto just watched. Then came the fateful third pitch, and yeah: it was, just as FoxTrax suggested on TV, outside by a couple of inches, maybe three.
Which set Votto off.
Well, I'm sorry but until we've got an automated strike zone, even the best umpire is occasionally going to miss a pitch that's two or three inches outside.
Except -- and if there weren't an except I wouldn't have bothered with all this -- except Tim Welke's one of the very worst balls-and-strikes umpires in the majors, and without a good union on his side, he probably would have been made redundant years ago. If you believe the objective evidence, anyway.
In Welke's defense, he has improved quite a lot over these last seven or eight seasons ... but then, so have his colleagues, leaving Welke still near the bottom of the accuracy rankings. So Welke probably deserves an A for effort ... but still a D (or worse) for performance. And considering how much time Votto spends looking at numbers on the Internet, do you wanna bet he doesn't know all this as well as anyone in uniform?
Essentially, what we saw Wednesday night was baseball's best balls-and-strikes hitter vs. baseball's worst balls-and-strikes umpire. So maybe we shouldn't be surprised that the situation was combustible.
Which isn't to excuse Votto. Of course we don't know what was said by him or by Welke, but it seems that Votto got ejected not for arguing about the call, but by expecting permission to complain at some length, apparently even asking for time-out to keep complaining. And complaining when he didn't get that.
Votto was frustrated, and there was a good short-term reason (Strike 2) and a good long-term reason (Welke's incompetence) for his frustration. But reasons aren't excuses, and Major League Baseball can't allow its officials to be treated as Votto treated Welke.
So a suspension is positively, absolutely, manifestly in order: for hurling his helmet, for verbally abusing an umpire, and for getting too close to the umpire.
