The saddest of all mythical tales are when gods become mortal. Joey Votto, routinely in four digit OPS territory, experienced a calamitous power outage en route to a nearly 200 point year over year decrease in OPS. To wit, coming into 2018, Votto had a career HR/FB rate of 11.4%. In 2018, that number was only 4.8%.
We’ve seen this before, namely in 2014 when Votto played a truncated season on one healthy leg. To the best of my knowledge, there were no analogous injuries in 2018, which makes the drop-off season a bit more curious.