With career earnings of nearly $300 million, he drives a minivan, is obsessed with chess, performs ridiculous dances on TikTok, and bought his teammate a donkey.

Canadian Joey Votto is in his final miles in baseball, and despite the impressive stats he’ll have there over the course of his long career, he will have managed to make a far greater impact with a fight off the field than he has publicly announced against mental illness.

I wrote a column about it in June Zack Greinke, the most fascinating and misunderstood athlete in sportsIn my opinion.

But in baseball’s media world, many believe it’s more likely Joey Votto, the most fascinating athlete.

And it’s true that he is something.

Their stories are similar. They are two brilliant, gifted men who the public could not always decipher early in their careers, but who ended up becoming heroes of their sport.

Next year is it the last time?

Votto turns 40 next month. He is just finishing a 10-year, $225 million contract with the Cincinnati Reds. The team could agree a deal with him for $20 million next season, which could be his final year.

He made the All-Star Game six times and hit over 2,000 times in his career, including 355 home runs. Many consider him the greatest Canadian player in history, but in a country also linked to Ferguson Jenkins, Larry Walker and Freddie Freeman, the debate is open.

In short, Votto is a baseball prodigy and a strong inductee for the Hall of Fame.

A shallow, introverted, lonely guy… a robot: That’s how Joey Votto was portrayed when he started baseball. He didn’t talk much, didn’t interact with fans much, and didn’t spend much time with his teammates off the pitch.

In fact, I was visiting him in Cincinnati at the time. I left the stadium with my wife a few minutes after the game and saw him leaving the parking lot. He might have had an emergency, but it’s still special for a player to leave the stadium four minutes after a game before all the fans have had time to come down the stairs.

When he changed

As he told CBC, everything changed in his life in 2008 when his father died suddenly at the age of 52.

The first baseman from a suburb of Toronto fell into a deep depression and left baseball.

“I couldn’t accept it. I got to a point where I thought I was going to die,” he said at a press conference the following year. He had subsequently spoken publicly about his problems, specifically to draw attention to this type of fight.

Because Votto went to therapy and came back a changed athlete, both on the pitch and in his personality.

In fact, he began to let go and let everyone discover their true nature.

And he became one of the most dominant and funniest guys in baseball.

In 2017, he promised one of his teammates that if he made it to the All-Star Game, he would buy him a donkey, which he did.

Votto even disguised himself as a donkey in the field. He also liked wearing the Reds mascot costume. For an interview, he donned the uniform of an RCMP police officer to poke fun at what Americans think of Canada.

Then few people really understand why Joey Votto began to indulge in the social network TikTok.

The very introverted guy started making videos with ridiculous but very funny dances and songs. He became an internet sensation, even recording dances with fans during games.

He has been known for years for his unique relationship with his fans. And he doesn’t mind. In a viral video from 2017, a fan yells at him for remembering when he was good. Votto replies that he remembers the time when this supporter was skinny.

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Crazy as a broom

Athletic media ran interviews with several of Votto’s teammates last February to illustrate his unique personality.

When one of them was traded, he memorized the song Goodbye my lover by James Blunt and sang it with a microphone on his last ride with the player on the bus.

The one who started liking baseball at a young age because he could play alone by throwing a ball against a wall, took improv classes during his major league career because he felt it made him better with his able to communicate with teammates.

He could fool around, but Votto is also known as a competitor and baseball genius. He never wants to get upset and his analysis of baseball was on a different level than others.

He would tell his coaches who would or would not make good hitters in the minor leagues.

He, who enjoyed reading medical journals, also had personal analysis charts of all referees at a time when teams had not yet begun to look into such statistics.

Like Zach Greinke, Votto seems to have always had a special relationship with money. After driving a different $200,000 car almost every week, he arrived at training camp in 2014 in a minivan.

And he was in love with his minivan because it was better for his dog. Impressed in front of his teammates, he showed that the sliding door opened automatically. “I can even charge it up during the game and then go home afterwards,” he told teammate Bronson Arroyo, who then told The Athletic the story.

In short, Joey Votto is a great baseball player, but his way of using the negative in his life to come back stronger is as exceptional as all of his hits in my opinion.