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Joey Votto thought about baseball a little differently than most people.

Case in point: When he realized he was bad at diving for ground balls at first base, he taught himself how to dive by lunging into a pool over and over again.

Votto was one of the best hitters of his era (2007-2023), a National League MVP and six-time All Star with the Cincinnati Reds who piled up 2,135 hits and is likely headed to the Hall of Fame. More than 22,000 people have played Major League Baseball: Votto has more hits than all but 220 of them and more walks than all but 33 of them.

That’s why I find this story one of his coaches told me interesting and instructive.

One night, the Reds played at home, and Votto had three hits. They were all the same type of hits: topspin one-hoppers through the infield.

The next day, Votto talked to the team’s then-hitting coach, Don Long.

“That wasn’t a good night,” Votto said.

Long was surprised. Baseball is hard enough. Most players would just be happy with a three-hit night. So Long asked Votto what he meant.

“If that’s the way I’m hitting,” Votto said, “it’s not going to give me what I want at the end of the year.”

Then Long asked Votto what would be a good night.

“Well, tonight we’re facing a tough left-hander,” Votto told him, “so I’m going to try to hit a line drive over the shortstop every time.”

That night, Long said, Votto walked once, had one hit to left field and drilled two one-hop bullets for outs to the shortstop. Statistically speaking, he had a worse game than the night before.

But the next day, Votto showed up at the ballpark and told Long, “That was a good night.”

There is an obvious lesson: Votto understood that in the long run, the process mattered more than a single result.

But my takeaway is slightly different: Votto didn’t let the results (and the emotions they produced) influence his thoughts. He was able to separate the feelings of a good night in the box score from the truth of a bad night in his head.

That’s much harder than it sounds.

It’s such a hard thing to do, in fact, that poker players have a term for it: “resulting.” Annie Duke, the former professional poker player, defines resulting as “confusing the quality of a decision with the luck of the outcome.”

As Duke wrote in her book, “Thinking in Bets”:

“When I consult with executives, I sometimes start with this exercise. I ask group members to come to our first meeting with a brief description of their best and worst decisions of the previous year. I have yet to come across someone who doesn’t identify their best and worst results rather than their best and worst decisions.”

Duke argues that we place too much emphasis on the result of a decision, because those results often happen for reasons beyond our control.

One small example in her book jumped out: If she started with a pair of aces (the best possible starting hand in poker) but ended up losing a large bet on the hand, it would be absurd for her to second-guess whether she had made the wrong decision.

As Duke wrote:

“One of the things poker teaches is that we have to take satisfaction in assessing the probabilities of different outcomes given the decisions under consideration and in executing the bet we think is best. With the constant stream of decisions and outcomes under uncertain conditions, you get used to losing a lot. To some degree, we’re all outcome junkies, but the more we wean ourselves from that addiction, the happier we’ll be.”

Baseball is a particularly instructive sport. Sometimes you hit a ball 110 mph right at the third baseman for an out. Other times you check-swing, hit the ball off the end of your bat and have a soft bloop fall in for a single.

One is a great result; the other is a great process. Votto had both the discipline and trust — in his process and in himself — to separate the two.