How Cincinnati Reds icon Joey Votto symbolizes stalled free agent market | Press Box Wag

GOODYEAR, Arizona – During a spring training that already broke the stupid meter with MLB's rollout of its new see-through uniform pants, we've reached new levels of bizarre with the appearance Friday of a former MVP on a sports talk show to "hawk my wares" as a free agent.

The only real question on the bizarro meter is whether Cincinnati Reds icon Joey Votto's last-ditch sales pitch to teams through his host pal on the Dan Patrick Show is any stranger than the fact the reigning National League Cy Young winner, Blake Snell, remains unsigned among a large number of presumably high-value players in free agency this winter.

“Something’s going on,” said Reds infielder Jeimer Candelario, who may have been wise to sign in early December when he did rather than try to squeeze a better deal from one of his five other suitors later in the winter.

Kiké Hernandez started to say out loud what some players have been whispering all winter after he signed a one-year, $4 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers last week.

"I'm not going to say the 'C' word, but I think the 'C' word needs a capital 'C,' "he told The Athletic, referring to collusion, a cardinal management sin in a collectively bargained industry. "The timing of the calls were very similar. The numbers were pretty much the same throughout. . . . And it's not just me."

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Former MVP Cody Bellinger, who seemed poised for a $150-million-plus contract, eventually settled for a three-year, $80 million deal (with multiple opt-outs) to return to the Cubs last week, a few days before Gold Glove third baseman Matt Chapman agreed to a $53 million, three-year deal with the Giants (also with opt-outs).

Snell and World Series-winning starter Jordan Montgomery still inexplicably remained unsigned at the time Chapman got his deal. And even at the other end of the spectrum, players seeking short-term deals, and even minor-league deals with camp invites, seem to have been squeezed.

"The free agent market has ground to a halt," Votto said during his interview with Patrick.

Not surprisingly, the players union – which beat management in a collusion case in the 1980s – is taking notice.

“Each market tends to have some uniqueness to it,” union chief Tony Clark said when he made a stop in Reds camp. “It isn’t until the market as a whole, top to bottom, plays itself out that we circle back at the end of the market and have conversations about the conversations that are being had with all the players, all the individual representatives.”

He also said that with a month to go before the season starts, this market “is a little different than what we’ve seen in the past, adding, “We’ll re-engage to the extent it becomes necessary based on the information we get.”

Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, anybody need a two-time Cy Young winner for their pitching staff?

And what's next for Votto? The Home Shopping Network? A cardboard sign at the corner of Clark and Addison?

Reds manager David Bell said he’s waiting for Votto to find his next team before reaching out but finds it strange that nobody has signed Votto, even at 40.

“Because of what he’s done and because of how much he wants to play,” Bell said. “I know he wants to play. I know he’s going to stay ready. I’m confident that something will still happen.”

Votto told Patrick that after getting his shoulder back to full health and feeling like he can still play, it would feel like a "bit of purgatory" to have his career end without being able to prove it this year.

And this might be the most egregious, ugly outcome of the way teams (with record revenues and franchise values) have embraced the bottom-line, computer-aided projection models for evaluating players as if they were interchangeable widgets – for players as well as fans who want to see them play:

“Realizing that jobs aren’t flowing, you just miss the game,” Votto told Patrick. “The love I feel is coming to the forefront for the game, and I still feel a longing to compete. I think I’m still good. I really do.”

Strike Pay

Want your kids to take homework a little more serious and get better grades? Sometimes cash helps.

Apparently Reds coaches look at getting kids to throw strikes the same way.

“It’s a little competition we have within the clubhouse,” touted pitching prospect Chase Petty said. “It’s motivating us to be better in the zone.

“It’s cool.”

As in cool cash.

The Reds have posted regularly updated standings of the highest-percentage strike throwers in camp (non-game throwing sessions and games both included).

The best percentage at the end of camp wins $1,000.

Prospect Julian Aguiar topped the list posted Saturday at 71 percent, with Brent Suter, Tyler Gilbert and last year’s first-round draft pick, Rhett Lowder, all rounding off to 69 percent. Nice, right?

Petty was among the dozen pitchers in camp over 60 percent.

“You got to stay on that mark, stay consistent and just keep doing what you’re doing throughout spring training,” Petty said, “and hopefully get that cash.”

He Said It

“I think ‘competitive’ is a losing word. If you’re ‘competitive,’ you’re just good enough to lose. We don’t want to do that. We want to win.”

*Reds president Nick Krall, on a recent episode of the Foul Territory podcast, when asked why so many executives talk about being “competitive” instead of about championships or dynasties.

Early Stat of the Spring

After all nine on-schedule pitchers in the Reds’ rotation mix had taken their first turns of spring, they’d combined for 17 2/3 innings scoreless innings (with 19 strikeouts, six walks).

You can start to see why one rival scout said Friday it’s the Reds’ pitching that’s more impressive than the young hitters getting all the attention — and that Krall’s additions to that group over the winter are why he believes the Reds should win the division this year.

MLB to Infielders: Get Out of Reds' Way

Did the running’ Reds just get another boost from MLB for the most electric base-running roster in baseball?

The Reds learned the hard way Friday about how much MLB plans to crack down on so-called obstruction by fielders on plays on the bases when minor-leaguer Sal Stewart was called for a violation on a play at third late in the Cactus League game.

But what baseball taketh away from the fielder, baseball giveth to the runner.

And with the bigger bases installed last year, an even tighter pitch clock with men on base this year and now a theoretically wider lane for the runner, there might be no stopping some of these Red blurs in double-knits.

“That’s how I’m going to look at it,” Bell said.

The Big Number: 0

That’s how many players in Reds camp have World Series experience. Their manager, by comparison, played in all seven games of the 2002 World Series for the Giants (who lost Game 7 to the Angels).

In fact, only five players who finished last season in the Reds’ organization have any playoff experience at all (combined 12 games).

Maybe that’s why the front office added nine free agents over the winter with 41 combined playoff games of experience, including four on big-league contracts: Emilio Pagán (11 games), Nick Martinez (seven), Frankie Montas (three) and Suter (two).

Clueless In Seattle

Noted baseball historian and philosopher Annie Savoy of Durham, N.C., once said, “The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness.”

She would have loved Levi Stoudt.

The one-time Reds pitcher, who was acquired from Seattle in the 2022 Luis Castillo trade and claimed by Seattle when the Reds waived him last month, popped off to the Seattle Times about how the Reds pitching infrastructure apparently tricked him into missing the strike zone 90 times and giving up a whopping 16 hits and 11 runs in just 10 1/3 innings after they burdened him with a big-league debut he didn’t earn last year (or something along those lines).

“It was a little bit of I’d say lack of direction,” Stoudt told Ryan Divish of the Times. “It was kind of not much of a philosophy.”

Nice guy. But dude might want to invest a little spring training per diem in a mirror.

“I wish him the best,” Krall said.

Care to elaborate?

“I wish him the best.”

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: How Joey Votto is a cardboard sign of MLB's broken free agent market