Joey Votto is an artist. Or maybe he’s a scientist.

For the purpose of this discussion, let us say that the job of standing at the plate in a baseball game and trying to help your team score runs is more art than science. The act of squaring a round bat to a round ball is definitely a physics problem, but there are countless ways to do it well. Add in all the other elements — the head games, the pitching matchup, the balance between patience and aggression — and baseball feels a lot more impressionist.

And so, Joey Votto: Not just an artist, but one of the greatest such artists ever.

Votto, the 34-year-old first baseman for the Cincinnati Reds, was voted the Postmedia Male Athlete of the Year after a season in which he lost the National League’s MVP race to Giancarlo Stanton in the closest vote for that award since 1979.

The recognition from the Postmedia voting panel came for a season in which Votto, seven years after he did win the NL MVP, put up another absurd bunch of numbers: a slash line of .320/.454/.578, plus 36 home runs, 106 runs scored, 100 RBIs and a league-leading 134 walks.

“Thanks,” says Votto over the phone. “I’m ecstatic about the way I performed this past season.”

But what is remarkable about Votto, who learned to play on the ballparks and parking lots of west Toronto, is not just that his 2017 was extraordinary, but that it was kind of typical of him. When he is healthy — and he played 162 games this season, the statistic of which he said he was most proud — he is just that good.

How exceptional is Votto, the artist? To consider that, let us take a side tour into the science of statistics, but we promise it will be brief.

One of the fundamental underpinnings of today’s assessment of player value is that the single most important factor in creating offence is getting runners on base. This is why on-base percentage (OBP) has come to be recognized as more important than batting average and why a statistic like on-base plus slugging (OPS), which reflects both the ability to get on base and to hit for power, is the best measurement of a player’s offensive contribution. Votto led the National League in both in 2017, in a season in which Stanton hit 59 home runs for Miami.

Votto also led the NL in intentional walks with 20, a reflection of the fact that he piled up all those remarkable numbers as the third hitter in a lineup that was young and free-swinging. Adam Duvall had 31 home runs as the usual hitter behind Votto, but he also struck out 170 times.

Votto had just 83 strikeouts on the season and he had a stretch of reaching base two or more times that lasted 20 straight games, a mark only bettered by Ted Williams in 1948. Ted Williams was pretty good. Votto also went 36 straight games reaching base safely at least once in 2017, which was still 10 games short of his career best set in 2015.

But that is just what Votto does. One more statistic: OPS+ takes OPS and adjusts it for the league and the ballpark in which the hitter plays. The OPS+ of a league-average hitter is 100. Votto owns a career OPS+ of 158. That is, among hitters who played after 1900 and for at least 10 seasons, tied for 12th all-time. The players above Votto on that list are a roll call of the sport’s legends: Babe Ruth, Williams, Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig, plus extra old-timey types like Ty Cobb and Shoeless Joe Jackson. Votto is in the company here of guys who wore baggy cloth uniforms and handlebar moustaches. The only sort-of contemporaries of Votto who played more than a decade and are better than him in OPS+ are Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire. Insert asterisk here.

Votto’s greatness, though, is a thing appreciated more by baseball people than by casual fans, in part because he’s not a wall-banging masher like Stanton or Aaron Judge and in part because he plays in Cincinnati, a small market, for a Reds team that has been not good.

“It’s not easy,” Votto says of playing on a Reds team that was 68-94, last in the NL Central and 21 games out of a wild-card playoff berth. It was the third straight year in which the Reds won fewer than 70 games. Votto, for all he has done individually over 11 seasons, has played in just nine post-season games.

“It’s tough losing,” he says. “It sucks seeing other teams win on your field, and it sucks seeing the stadium empty.”

Cincinnati, long considered such a baseball town that the Reds had the moxie to name their stadium the Great American Ball Park, drew just 1.8 million fans to that park in 2017, second-worst in the National League.

“I leave my house, and I go to get groceries or something, and people will see me and they will still say hello,” Votto says. “But in the past, there was a genuine excitement there. Cincinnati doesn’t have that right now.

“And then I go home to Toronto,” Votto says, “and everyone’s asking me, do you know Jose Bautista? Do you know Edwin (Encarnacion)? And it’s like, ‘God-dang, that’s what I want.’”

But if he is going to get back to that in Cincinnati, it will likely take some time. The Reds are very young, with only Votto and starting pitcher Homer Bailey (31) older than 30. Shortstop Zack Cozart, 32, who was the second-most valuable player on the Reds by wins above replacement last season, left as a free agent for the Los Angeles Angels. And Votto still has six years left, plus a team option, on his 10-year, US$225-million contract. But he dismisses any notion of asking for a trade to somewhere else.

“Baseball is not really one of those sports,” he says, adding that players who can get guaranteed contracts and no-trade clauses know that there is a give-and-take when you sign a big-dollar deal. “I’ve never felt like I’ve not wanted to be here.”

When he played at the Rogers Centre for the first time since 2009 this past season, Votto allowed that when he was a teenager, “the thought of playing for the Jays was at the top.” But, Votto said: “There’s something about joining a club and building a relationship and a commitment to a team.”

Votto has also said, though, that he takes particular pride in his eastern roots, since most of the very few successful Canadian major leaguers had longer seasons in mild West Coast winters. Votto, as a kid, was out there on the snow and ice, banging balls against a schoolyard wall.

He says he doesn’t think too much, yet, about the kids who might look at him and realize that someone from a hockey-mad country can not just make Major League Baseball, but be exceptionally good at it.

“I think that those are things that athletes think about when they are done playing,” he says. “But, yeah, if boys or girls decide to play baseball, or any sport, because of watching me, that’s great.”

Then, Votto adds: “Male or female, that’s important.”

It’s a fitting postscript. Joey Votto can inspire us all.

• Email: sstinson@postmedia.com | Twitter: @scott_stinson