Joey Votto was taking his cuts near the on-deck circle Monday night when he was drawn into conversation with some boisterous fans sitting close to the field at the Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati.
"I remember when you used to be good," heckled one, an obvious supporter of the Cleveland Indians, who were in town to play Votto's Reds that evening.
The ensuing exchange was captured on video and is making the rounds on the Internet.
"I remember when you used to be thin," Votto retorted, eliciting peals of laughter from his antagonists.
"Now you guys are just talking. You're not stating facts," Votto continued before pointing to the guy recording the moment on his smartphone. "Right now this guy's filming this. … I've got something to lose. You guys don't even have a life, so you've got nothing to lose at all."
The exchange was vintage Votto, who carries one of the biggest sticks in Major League Baseball but doesn't necessarily speak softly.
One of the greatest Canadian-born hitters to ever grace a baseball diamond, the intensely private 33-year-old also comes equipped with a large personality – and sometimes chooses to put it on display, as he did to so much fanfare Monday.
"Those guys were fun," the first baseman said during an interview this week here in Cleveland, with the Reds in town for a return engagement against the Indians. "I just wish they wouldn't talk over me.
"I don't mind back-and-forthing with someone, but just let me say my piece and then you can say your piece. The guys kept talking over me, and it was killing me."
The Reds are currently on an eastern road swing that will take them into Philadelphia to play a weekend series against the Phillies.
After that, Cincinnati will roll into Toronto, Votto's hometown, for a three-game interleague set that opens Monday night against the Blue Jays, where the left-handed hitter's prodigious skills will be front and centre.
"From what I've seen he's one of the best hitters in the league," said José Bautista, who has been known to swing a pretty mean bat for the Blue Jays. "What else can you say when you can just look at his numbers?"
Those numbers include a generous salary – a 10-year, $225-million (U.S.) deal that Votto signed with Cincinnati in 2014, with a full no-trade clause. He will earn $22-million this season, twice as much as Sidney Crosby, making him Canada's highest-paid professional athlete.
Votto has not played in Toronto since 2009, when he went public with the debilitating panic attacks he suffered after his father died suddenly at the age of 52. It's a topic he has rarely spoken about publicly since.
And it was the year before he became just the third Canadian to be chosen as baseball's most valuable player, alongside Larry Walker and Justin Morneau, winning the award in the National League after hitting .324 with 37 home runs and a gaudy .424 on-base mark.
"It's a little different now," Votto said about returning home to play. "The last time I was there was in '09, and the circumstances were a little different. I was a younger player, and there was the World Baseball Classic.
"It all felt so fast. I promised myself after that that I wouldn't let it feel fast any more. And that's just not getting distracted by a lot of things that don't have a lot to do with my daily preparation and helping the team to win."
He remains at the top of his game as one of the purest hitters in baseball. His average is .299 through his first 46 games to go along with 12 home runs.
Along with being above-average defensively at first, he has put up almost unworldly numbers at the plate since he burst onto the scene in his first full season in 2008.
Heading into this year, he was carrying a career.312 batting average while clouting 217 home runs, an average of 24 a year.
And he's almost always on base. In 2016, he led the National League in on-base percentage for the fifth time in the past seven seasons with a mark of .434.
And nobody walks more than Votto, who has led the league four times in free passes.
Last season it appeared he was entering a decline, hitting a meagre (for him) .252 with a .386 on-base percentage heading into the All-Star break.
Upset to the point that he was seriously considering walking away from the game, he turned on the jets after that, hitting an astonishing .408 over the second half of the season with an eye-popping .490 on-base rate.
"I was mostly angry the whole time," Votto said of his second-half tear. "I didn't really have any buffer. It was every day I had to go and make up for two or three months where I kind of sold myself short on a personal level."
It is all pretty impressive stuff for a player who continually insists that he was never a natural at the game.
"I think that's the fascination I have with him as a player," said Reds manager Bryan Price. "As accomplished as he is, he's never felt the game was easy. I think there's times when people tend to think that it does come easy."
Votto has had a few run-ins with umpires. In a notorious outburst in September 2015, he went off on Bill Welke and earned himself a two-game suspension, which was later reduced to one game.
(AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Votto grew up in the west Toronto suburb of Etobicoke, where he attended Richview Collegiate Institute and started to fall in love with baseball. A poster of Ted Williams adorned his bedroom wall.
"I saw potential – let's put it that way," said Bob Smyth, who coached Votto for several years in the Etobicoke Rangers Baseball program. "What I liked most was he worked real hard. I wasn't the easiest guy to play for because I demanded the players do certain things and they do it right. He never objected to any of that."
Votto, who grew to be 6 foot 2 and a solid 220 pounds, said he knew at a young age that he wanted to be a professional baseball player, and that goal consumed his spare time.
"I realized that if I wanted something I had to put some time and energy into it and I had to make some decisions," he said. "Probably my first love was basketball, and I realized that I had to probably not play that. I had a really good time playing football and realized I probably shouldn't play that, either.
"I don't have any regrets, but those were certainly things that I had fun doing."
Smyth said Votto initially wanted to be a pitcher, but when he first presented himself to the Rangers organization he had a sore arm. That's when Smyth moved him to first base.
Denny Berni, who oversees the Rangers Triple-A program, said that while Votto was in high school he was also a daily fixture at the Pro Teach Baseball indoor facility that he continues to operate in Etobicoke.
He said Votto would often head outside to nearby Connorvale, a gem of a minor-league baseball park nestled within a blue-collar residential community. The park has pro dimensions, with the wall in centre field about 375 feet from home plate.
"He'd set up the batting tee at home plate and routinely launch balls over the wall," said Berni, a former player in the Boston Red Sox minor-league organization. "That's not an easy thing to do and just shows you how strong he was even back in high school."
Berni said Votto still drops by unannounced during the off-season and thinks nothing of working out among starstruck youngsters who can barely believe their luck to be training alongside one of the game's greats.
"It's like having Sidney Crosby out on the rink skating beside you," Berni said.
Votto's draft year was 2002, and back then Smyth was an area scout for the Seattle Mariners. Pat Gillick, who helped build the Blue Jays World Series teams of 1992 and 1993, was Seattle's general manager.
Gillick has forged a reputation for rarely making a wrong turn when it comes to player development, but he guessed wrong when it came to Votto.
Smyth urged Gillick to choose the raw, athletic kid out of Etobicoke with Seattle's first-round pick, but the GM opted instead to select John Mayberry Jr. with the 28th pick overall.
Sixteen picks later, 44th overall in the second round, the Reds snapped up Votto.
While Mayberry went on to play for seven years, including a stint with the Blue Jays in 2014, he never came close to the class of Votto.
And Smyth, who has since retired and is living in Ladysmith, B.C., never forgets to remind Gillick of that fact whenever he runs into him.
"You don't laugh at Pat, but he's not pushing the argument [about Votto] with me any more," he said.
Votto remains one of the few veterans on a rebuilding Reds team that went to the playoffs three times from 2010 to 2013.
The Reds have struggled mightily the past few seasons with the youth movement – the average opening-day age was under 27 – and Votto's name has cropped up from time to time as possible trade bait.
That talk does not faze him.
"I have a no-trade clause, so I guess I get the final word," he said. "Teams are always going through the peaks and valleys. It's a very rare environment where there's steady success, steady competition. You see that in the larger markets like Chicago, New York. They've had to take a step back to go a couple steps forward. And the same thing's happening here in Cincinnati.
"As far as a trade, there's not a lot of appealing places that excite me. I genuinely get excited about putting on this uniform, about working here, about working and getting better with this group of guys."
When he signed his long-term deal with the Reds, Votto said he had no qualms about playing his entire career in a small market centre, even though his talents often get overlooked on the national stage.
"It's all I've known," he said. "Obviously I make a good bit of money. More than anything I was honoured that I was offered such a large contract. I think that any player, they want to feel embraced, they want to feel like somebody cares about them.
"And it's a very rare occurrence that a player gets that opportunity to, not only become synonymous with one team, but also gets to make such a decision so young in their career. I feel really grateful and honoured by that and I don't take it for granted at all."
Joey Votto: Raptors fan
During the off-season, Cincinnati Reds star Joey Votto will often return to Toronto, where he maintains a home, to visit and indulge in one of his other passions: basketball. He is a self-proclaimed fanatic who holds courtside season tickets for Toronto Raptors games at the Air Canada Centre.
"I had two goals as a kid," he said. "I wanted my own home gym and I wanted season tickets for the Raptors. I guess the boxes have been checked in that regard."
And while he loves basketball, he has serious issues with the Raptors' jerseys, believing the predominantly white-and-red-and-black colour scheme is not a proper representation of the city's rich sporting history. The Toronto Huskies, who played in the Basketball Association of America (BAA), used to use a blue-and-white colour scheme on their uniforms.
"Great sport," he said. "I wish they'd change the team name to the Huskies and make the uniforms blue and white. If there was a petition, I'd sign it for sure."
Votto said other cities have a colour scheme that their professional sports teams identify with; for instance, in Pittsburgh, black and yellow figure prominently on the jerseys of the Penguins and the Steelers.
"Toronto needs to be a blue-and-white city," Votto said.