More Baseball Questions, plus proposal

Patience versus aggression isn’t really a “strategy,” it’s just a function of who your personnel are. Once you’re handed a rosterful of professional ballplayers you can’t really decide “okay, let’s start drawing walks now.” Kansas City doesn’t have a lot of patient hitters, but they do basically everything else well, so that makes up for it.

It’s not even really necessarily the case that KC went out and sought impatient hitters. This is just who they ended up with. If they would have known what Jose Bautista was going to become I am sure they would have kept him. They wouldn’t have said “oh gosh, we don’t want a patient power hitter.”

[QUOTE=ISiddiqui]
People always find something to complain about if a team is lousy.
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More specifically, people have a weird habit of blaming a team’s best players when the team fails. So Reds fans criticize Joey Votto despite the fact that Votto is rather indubitably not the reason the Reds sucked. Votto was pretty good. He’s a better player than Edwin Encarnacion, and no Toronto fan complains about Edwin. If Votto had batted .400 and hit 50 homers the Reds still would have been a bad team.

Cincinnati had a number of truly awful ballplayers, such as Billy Hamilton, Skip Schumaker, Marlon Byrd and basically the entire starting rotation except for when Johnny Cueto was there. So why Reds fans jump on Votto I really don’t comprehend.

But this goes back to the “Strategy” of patience versus aggression. One can be frustrated as hell that teams pitch around Votto, but there isn’t anything Joey Votto can do about that. His manner of hitting is something he has spent basically his whole life learning. If he alters it now the result wouldn’t be more homers and fewer walks; it’d be fewer of everything.