I chatted with Joey Votto on a hot, cloudless mid-March morning. I set the scene not to dwell on the glorious weather - that would be boasting given the seemingly interminable Canadian winter of 2015 - but to stress the absence of clouds in the suburban Phoenix sky that day. 

The Cincinnati Reds' infielders had spent the previous hour catching pop-ups shot out of a machine near home plate on a back field at their spring training complex. The drill is more daunting that you might expect considering players must squint into the sun without benefit of passing clouds to lend perspective.

Of course, perspective is the one thing Votto always seems to have stuffed in his back pocket.

Votto is conspicuously bright and uncommonly thoughtful, even out of the batter's box. He also has the kind of rugged mien that makes him looks like he stepped out of a 1958 package of Topps baseball cards. Votto is a left-handed hitting anachronism, a 6-2, 220-pound first baseman who would not have seemed out of place in the 16-team bigs with Ted Williams, whose poster adorned the wall of his Toronto bedroom, and Stan Musial, with whom Votto is tied for 21st all-time in career on-base-percentage (.417).

There is also something almost disconcertingly modern about Votto, who has a sure grasp of both the art and the metrics of hitting. He realizes the inherent value of getting on base. He knows what WAR (wins above replacement value) is good for, to borrow from Edwin Starr's song: absolutely everything. Yet in dim corners of the game, there's still a tug of war between newer stats (OPS+) and familiar stats (RBI). Votto is the rope.

Votto was the National League MVP in 2010. He is the active leader in on-base percentage. He exhibits discipline at the plate, a circumspection that is laudable except, of course, when he is being assailed for declining RBI totals. 

Now you can't drive in runs without runners on base or without seeing pitches you can drive or without the lower-body wherewithal that allows you to drive the meaningful pitch when it does arrive - the now healthy Votto has been hampered by knee and quadriceps injuries - but 24 home runs and 73 RBI in 726 plate appearances two years ago, his last full season, had sparked muttering among the discontent seamheads of Cincinnati. Tough crowd. Talk about your Murmurers Row.

Votto is mindful of the criticism, albeit bemused and largely unimpressed. My sense is he's not using advanced stats as a fig leaf, decimal-point justification for his "traditional" numbers that slot somewhere between ho and hum for an MVP-caliber hitter.

I have been fascinated by the concept of the "batting eye" since I was a boy, reading about Williams, who early in his career shifted from right field to left to avoid staring into the sun at Fenway Park. Williams declined to chase pitches, rarely pursuing them outside what he called his "happy zone." Of course there are some renowned hitters who were always downright giddy. I covered the Yankees in 1977 and 1978 for The Record, in Hackensack, N.J., and watched the ebullient Reggie Jackson take violent hacks at some pitches that were quality only in the sense they were in the same zip code as home plate. He struck out 133 times in 1978 – Jackson called them U-turns because he would head straight back to the dugout from the batter's box – an impressive total them but nothing special during the current K pandemic that has swept baseball (Thirty-three hitters had more than 133 strikeouts in 2014, including 12-homer Xander Bogaerts). 

Andres Galarraga was a sucker for any pitch away. While I was at The Gazette in Montreal, Galarraga was invited to a state dinner at the White House in honor of the president of Venezuela. I wrote that if they serve the vegetables on the outside part of the plate, he probably would swing and miss. The Big Cat, whom previously I had dubbed the Big Kat, was not amused.

A bad-ball hitter figures prominently in family lore. My father died in 1953 at age 29, falling fatally ill (heart) at a game (He was a Brooklynite, a rabid Dodgers fan, but for some reason had been at Yankee Stadium that night). Now fast-forward to 1981, the playoffs, Expos vs. Phillies. My mother and husband No. 3 have driven from central New Jersey to Philadelphia, where, in the lobby of a Center City hotel, I introduce her to Duke Snider, an Expos broadcaster and superb Brooklyn hitter who, in the modern parlance, had been known to "expand the zone."

Duke: "Pleasure to meet you."

Mom: "If you hadn't swung at all those bad pitches, I bet my first husband would still be alive."

Having watched Vladimir Guerrero, the Dominican slugger would swing at any baseball that had the commissioner's signature (yet never strike out more than 95 times in a season) I planned, as a prelude to a final question, haul out the maxim that no one ever got off the island by walking. I was then going to ask Votto if you could get out of Canada that way.

Baseball has no clock, but hovering public relations men do. I never did ask.