Starkville | Joey Votto Traveled the World and Arrived Back in Baseball
Rates & Barrels: A show about Baseball
The Athletic
4.7 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 23 May 2026
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Joey Votto spent the years since his 2024 retirement surfing in Sri Lanka, watching cricket in Dubai, and learning to make sushi in Japan. Now he's back in North America and stopping by Starkville for a wide-ranging conversation with Jayson and Doug — what he took away from his travels, and how he sees baseball differently from the outside. Plus, the Pittsburgh Zoo and Boston's Franklin Park Zoo just completed a gorilla-for-gorilla swap — Frankie for Little Joe, straight up — and Jayson and Doug break it down before building their own MLB all-zoo team.
Rundown:
3:00 A Most Unusual Trade Involving Gorillas
6:45 Starkville’s All-Zoo Team
17:18 Joey Votto Joins the Show
20:00 Living the Retired Life
28:17 Greatness of Shohei Ohtani
38:48 Analyzing the Game
41:13 Reaction to ABS
48:07 If You Were Commissioner…
53:23 Living the Retired Life
1:00:06 Coming Back to the Game
1:04:45 Strange But True: Byron Buxton and the Minnesota Twins
Follow Jayson on Bluesky: @jaysonst.bsky.social
Follow Doug on Bluesky: @dougglanville.bsky.social
E-mail: starkville@theathletic.com
Starkville Hotline: (347) 313-8371
Subscribe to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels
Hosts: Jayson Stark & Doug Glanville
With: Joey Votto
Producer: Jason Potere
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Coming up this week on Starkville, Joey Votto will join us to tell us what the heck he's been up to since he retired. |
| 0:08.1 | We've got a blockbuster trade you may not have heard about between Boston and Pittsburgh. |
| 0:14.2 | We'll explain. |
| 0:15.6 | And there was that team that kind of threw a no-hitter, but did it really? |
| 0:22.1 | You'll find out on Strange But True. |
| 0:24.1 | It's all coming up on this week's Starkville. |
| 0:37.3 | Greetings and welcome to Starkville. |
| 0:40.3 | I'm Jason Stark. |
| 0:41.7 | I write about baseball for the athletic. |
| 0:44.6 | And I'm joined yet again by my good friend, writer, substacker, a man who once got |
| 0:52.5 | 1100 hits in the major leagues and our favorite voice of |
| 0:58.2 | baseball on ESPN radio. Doug Glennville, Doug, how are you, buddy? |
| 1:05.0 | I'm doing great. I'm doing great. Seattle this past weekend,, yeah, it's far. |
| 1:11.1 | Seattle's pretty far from Connecticut, if you hadn't looked at the map, you know. |
| 1:15.2 | But good times. |
| 1:17.1 | And so, you know, Mariners were struggling a little bit, but it was good to see. |
| 1:22.4 | I saw Colt Emerson's debut, you know, one of those young prospects that got a big contract before they set foot in a major league ballpark other than a fan. |
| 1:32.2 | And, yeah, so it was fun. |
| 1:34.2 | You know why they had to call up Cole Emerson, right? |
| 1:36.7 | You can't win if you don't have the horses. |
| 1:39.3 | Go with that. |
| 1:41.1 | All right. |
... |
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