Joey Votto was in Paris. It was late October, a few weeks after the regular season had ended. And Matt Carpenter, his old rival from the NL Central, was texting him, wanting to know how Votto had done it. How, at age 37, he had reversed the aging curve after three sub-par seasons and put together a year more typical of his brilliant career.

Carpenter, who had only played for the Cardinals, had built a rapport over the years with Votto, who had only played for the Reds. Carpenter would never compare himself to Votto, whom he views as a Hall of Famer, but he had always thought their styles as left-handed hitters were similar. Votto likewise had admired Carpenter, who at 6-foot-4, 210 pounds looked almost too skinny to be a major leaguer, yet had made himself into a three-time All-Star.

The two began texting. Carpenter, not knowing Votto was on vacation, said the conversation could wait. No, Votto said. He wanted to talk. The subject excited him. He knew exactly what Carpenter was feeling, recalled experiencing the same frustration from 2018 to ’20, when his offensive production plunged.

“I’ve never had my heart broken in relationships,” Votto said. “I’ve had my heart broken those few years when I was playing poorly.“

Carpenter, 36, is a year younger than Votto was entering last season. If anything, his decline has been even more precipitous. In 2018, Carpenter hit 36 home runs and finished ninth in the National League MVP balloting. But he regressed in ’19, then in his own words, “basically fell off a cliff.”

His numbers the past two seasons — a combined .176 batting average, seven homers, a .605 OPS — turned him into a bench player. The Cardinals, the team that drafted him in the 13th round out of TCU in the 2009 draft, declined his $18.5 million option at the end of last season, making him a free agent. But Carpenter is not ready to concede that his career is nearing its end.

“I’m extremely motivated to keep playing, and not just keep playing,” Carpenter said. “I don’t want to just fill a roster spot. I really feel like I’ve got more left in the tank to be a productive major-league player.”

To fulfill that belief, he has spent the offseason traveling around the country, trying to fix his swing. Carpenter visited a cutting-edge baseball performance lab in Baton Rouge, La., private hitting instructors in Santa Clarita, Calif., and a trusted former teammate in Stillwater, Ok. But the process began with the call with Votto.

“One thing I love about Joey more than anything is that he’s so blatantly honest,” Carpenter said. “If he would have told me, ‘I think you’ve peaked. I think this is it,’ honestly, I probably would have retired. But he said, ‘I think you do have a lot left. I think you’ve kind of lost your way a little bit.’”

Votto told Carpenter serious changes were necessary. That after his own down seasons he resolved to train differently, to move beyond simply controlling the strike zone and putting the ball in play. Votto wanted to transform himself back into the feared slugger he was when he won the NL MVP award in 2010. A golf instructor had told him the top money-earners on the tour generally were the longest drivers. The comparison resonated with Votto. “You look at the top Statcast performers, barrels, wRC+, we all have the same sort of fingerprint,” he said. “We’re the hardest hitters in the sport.”

To remake himself, Votto adopted a drill in which he would step into the batting cage and set the pitching machine to maximum velocity and maximum spin. He would swing as hard as he could, trying to increase his exit velocity while maintaining his technique. The drill, designed to help Votto better handle the dominant pitching of this era, was unlike anything he had done previously. The same would be true for Carpenter.

“I’ve always been the guy who went into the batting cage and only worked on technique, swung the bat — for lack of a better term — real easy,” Carpenter said. “My whole thing was, I wanted to go in the batting cage and feel good. I never really trained to swing as hard, generate as much power and force as you could. There’s a lot of failure involved in that, especially at the beginning.”

Carpenter, though, was well aware of what Votto had accomplished in 2021. Votto hit 36 homers, matching the second-highest total of his career. His adjusted OPS, 36 percent above league average, was his best since 2017, when he finished second for NL MVP. Carpenter bought into the principles Votto was espousing. And Votto made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that he believed Carpenter was capable of such a resurgence, too.

“I’m pretty steady when I share my opinion on things. I try not to get emotional or raise my voice,” Votto said. “But he’s a high-end performer, a competitive person used to playing at a certain level. There were moments where I was talking pretty firmly to him, raising my voice, using cuss words.

“I was like, ‘Dude! C’mon! Let’s f——— go.’ You can do this!’ I was like Tony Robbins, basically. It was jibing with what he was feeling. He was like, ‘Yes!’”

Carpenter used a pen and pad to take notes. The impact of the conversation on him was so profound, he recalled it lasting 3 1/2 hours. Votto said it lasted around 45 minutes.

“I hung up the phone and I was fired up,” Carpenter said. “I was already extremely motivated because of the way it had ended for me in St. Louis. And when I got off that phone call with Joey, I was even more motivated.”

For years, Marucci Sports had performed the essential duty of a bat-manufacturing company, producing bats to the specifications players wanted. The company believed in certain principles — denser wood, for example — but there was no particular science to its process, no research.

Golf, as officials at Marucci came to understand, was different. The technology was more advanced. Players were fitted for clubs. And in the spring of 2018, the Marucci people met with Liam Mucklow, founder of The Golf Lab, which for nearly a decade had been diving into the connection between a golfer’s body and his club.

Mucklow conducted a trial with Marucci during spring training in Arizona with five independent ball players paid by the company. The idea, according to Kyle Ourso, Marucci’s vice-president of sports marketing, was to determine whether changing a player’s bat would affect his performance.

At the end of the exercise, Ourso asked the players to choose their favorite models from the eight they had tried. All five chose bats that, according to various metrics, were not their best performers. When Ourso informed them of the discrepancy, the players said they wanted the bats that helped them produce better numbers.

Marucci was onto something. On Jan. 18, 2020, it announced a partnership with Baseball Performance Lab, a newly formed division of The Golf Lab. Marucci, according to its news release, became the first brand to offer on-site bat fitting for wood and aluminum bats. But the lab goes even further, also measuring the movements of a player’s body.

Enter Carpenter, who spent a day at the lab in early December with two accomplished veteran hitters (who did not wish to be named because of their affiliations with other bat companies). Never before had Carpenter taken a data-driven approach to his offseason. Previously he would just lift weights and hit in the cage, then show up for spring training — a routine that no longer was working for him.

At Marucci, Carpenter sought an objective analysis of what he was doing wrong. Jeff Albert, the Cardinals’ hitting coach since 2019, might have been capable of providing such answers, given his deep knowledge of analytics. Carpenter, however, admits, “I just never bought into (analytics) like I should have.” Albert, like all club officials during the owners’ lockout, is prohibited by Major League Baseball from commenting publicly on players.

Marucci, applying concepts from golf, uses three measurements to calculate what a player’s maximum exit velocity should be under the specific conditions at the lab on the day he is tested. Lower-body strength is measured through a vertical jump, core strength through an overhead toss of an 8.8-pound medicine ball at the end of a sit-up, upper-body strength from a chest pass of the medicine ball from a sitting position.

Carpenter said he was above major-league average across the board in all three measurements. But when it came to the analysis of his swing, he was considerably behind the other two major leaguers. The lab uses a dual force plate centered on the ground to measure a player’s vertical, horizontal and torque force when swinging, and a 3-D motion-capture system to assess different areas of his body.

“All the data was showing it,” Carpenter said. “It wasn’t necessarily a strength thing. It wasn’t aging. It was flat-out my swing had gotten out of sorts.”

Such confirmation was important to Carpenter, who had sensed for the past few years that the mechanics of his swing had broken down, but did not know for sure. Among other things, the data indicated he should switch to a bat different from the David Wright model — 31.5 ounces, 33 1/2 inches — that he had used since Double A. That bat, Carpenter said, graded out poorly in the Marucci evaluation, proving the wrong fit for his body type and swing path. He switched to a bat that was the same length but three-tenths of an ounce heavier, with more weight in the barrel.

Carpenter had learned he was not using the ground properly, not keeping his bat in the zone long enough, not generating the necessary force with his swing.

“I went to the lab to get to the analytical-type view,” he said. “Then I went to a baseball guy and said, ‘Help me fix this.’”

The “baseball guy” was former major-league catcher Tim Laker, who was between jobs as the Mariners’ hitting coach and Dodgers’ minor-league hitting coordinator. Laker was working with Craig Wallenbrock, the hitting guru who had transformed the career of J.D. Martinez and others. Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci had dubbed Wallenbrock “The Oracle of Santa Clarita.” Author Jared Diamond had devoted an entire chapter to the instructor in his book, “Swing Kings,” which chronicles players like Martinez who had remade their swings and become stars.

Laker had been Paul Goldschmidt’s hitting coach with the Diamondbacks in 2017-18. Goldschmidt, Carpenter’s former Cardinals teammate, had recommended him highly. For Carpenter, the situation was urgent. He reached out to Laker almost immediately after leaving Marucci in early December. They arranged for Carpenter to visit the first week of January. Another of Carpenter’s former Cardinals teammates, Nolan Arenado, also had worked with Laker previously, and would be coming at the same time.

Prior to the sessions, Laker studied video of Carpenter as well as his data, using his last big season, 2018, as a baseline. Carpenter’s approach did not appear to be the issue. His walk rate had remained fairly steady. His chase rate last season actually dropped, while his hard-hit percentage increased. But each season from 2019 to ’21, his strikeout rate jumped an average of 2.5 percent, peaking at a career-high 30.9 percent.

Carpenter’s heat maps also were revealing. In 2018, he had covered a good chunk of the strike zone. But in ’21, he had a big hole on the inner half, and actually hit the ball hardest when it was down and away. Problem was, he often rolled over when he made contact in that part of the zone, pulling grounders into the shift. “There was something going on with his swing,” Laker said. “He wasn’t covering as much of the zone.”

Upon arriving in Santa Clarita, Carpenter did not hit right away. First there was a conversation, with Wallenbrock, 75, offering insights that Carpenter said, “kind of blew my mind,” triggering memories of how he had hit in the past. The group then got to work, seeking to make Carpenter more efficient with his lower half and more direct with his swing. Hitters ideally are short to the ball and long through the zone. Carpenter’s swing essentially was the opposite, too long at the start, then out of the zone too quickly.

“When he first got in, to be honest, it was really rough,” Laker said. “If you watched him, when he first walked in the door and the first round (of batting practice) we took, you wouldn’t have guessed he was a big leaguer who has had the kind of success he has. It was that far gone.”

Carpenter’s path was not his only problem that needed correcting. He would lock his front knee early, which kept him from shifting from his back side to his front side. Getting “stuck” in that fashion caused him to spin with his lower half, and his bat to drag behind. He couldn’t catch up to fastballs. He couldn’t adjust to breaking balls. He lost his ability to loft the ball naturally. It was as if he was in a baseball form of checkmate.

Over two days, in sessions lasting a total of about five hours, Wallenbrock and Laker talked with Carpenter, studied video with him and employed a series of unorthodox drills to help get him back on track.

To prevent Carpenter from spinning, the coaches put a short bat on the ground between his feet, the tension forcing him to initiate his rotation with his hips and drive them forward. Next, they had him stand with each foot on one half of a semi-inflated Bosu ball while hitting balls flipped to him. The exercise forced Carpenter to stay flexible with his front leg for balance. Ten to 15 reps, that’s all it would take for Carpenter to develop a feel he would recreate in the cage.

And that was just the start.

To help Carpenter shift off his back side and into his front side, Wallenbrock and Laker had him throw baseballs and Frisbees sidearm with his top hand to replicate his swing path. The idea behind those movements, when translated to Carpenter’s swing, was to help him create greater length through the zone.

“The funny thing with hitting is, you put a bat in a guy’s hand, and your brain is so ingrained with how you’ve been swinging, it’s hard to tell them, ‘Here’s what you have to do,’” Laker said. “A lot of times when you have them do another action, throwing a Frisbee or a sidearm throw, your brain now doesn’t think of hitting, it thinks of those actions. It’s easy for them to feel the move they’re trying to make.”

Carpenter required one other adjustment with his swing path: He was top-hand dominant, and would almost “throw” his barrel to the ball. Wallenbrock teaches hitters to “lag” the barrel, keeping it behind the ball as long as possible. He and Laker had Carpenter take swings at maybe 40 to 50 percent, instructing him to just catch the ball with the barrel. They also encouraged him to incorporate an abbreviated finish to his swing, a la Chase Utley, to keep him from coming off the ball too quickly.

“All these things, once we put them together, his swing really started coming together, started to look a lot more like it did,” Laker said.

Yet even after all his work in California, Carpenter still felt he needed to take at least one more step.

Earlier this month, Carpenter sent a text to Matt Holliday, his friend and teammate with the Cardinals from 2011 to ‘16.

“I want to come up and hit,” Carpenter said. “When can I do that?”

“You’re welcome here any time,” Holliday replied.

“Here” is Oklahoma State University, a 3-hour, 45-minute drive from Carpenter’s home in Ft. Worth, Tx. Holliday is a volunteer assistant at OSU, working with hitters and outfielders under his older brother, Josh, the team’s head coach. He and Carpenter maintain regular contact, and both relished the chance to reconnect in a baseball setting. Holliday also figured the OSU hitters, as they prepared for their college season, would benefit from the chance to hit with another accomplished major leaguer.

Carpenter was an All-Star three times in four seasons when he and Holliday were teammates. Always one of the game’s more intelligent players, Holliday knew where Carpenter’s swing needed to be. The plan, Carpenter said, was to “dive in a little deeper” with the information he had received from Wallenbrock and Laker, “really just iron it out.”

The session, just like the one with those coaches, began as more of a conversation. Holliday shared some of what he has learned since joining the OSU staff in July 2019, and some of what he had seen watching Carpenter on TV. The flaws Holliday detected in Carpenter were some of the same ones Wallenbrock and Laker had sought to correct. “His hips, in my opinion, weren’t working right,” Holliday said.

The former teammates, now coach and pupil, worked to further refine Carpenter’s body movement. The next day, Holliday noticed a difference in the sound of the ball off Carpenter’s bat, as well as the flight and carry. Real-time data supported Holliday’s assessments. Carpenter said the data from his daily sessions at his alma mater, TCU, also is encouraging. At the end of this month, he plans to return to the Marucci lab to measure just how much progress he has made.

“I’m more confident about where I’m at and where my swing is than I have been in years, maybe ever,” Carpenter said.

Of course, it’s one thing for a player to talk excitedly about offseason changes, and another thing for him to apply them against major-league competition, in actual games. Carpenter believes his new, more efficient swing will help alleviate two of his biggest problems: his strikeout rate and his performance against the shift. But as a free agent, he must persuade a team that there were reasons for his sudden decline, and that he has taken the necessary steps to resurrect his career.

The expected adoption of a universal DH in the next collective-bargaining agreement should create greater opportunity for Carpenter. But the transaction frenzy that is almost certain to occur at the end of the owners’ lockout also will make it more difficult for a 36-year-old coming off two poor seasons to find a job.

“I believe in my heart he’s got a lot left,” said Arenado, who played against Carpenter with the Rockies from 2013 to ’20 before joining the Cardinals last season. “He’s trying to get back to who he is. And with the work I saw him do, I believe he will.”

Yet, as Votto can attest, such a revival will not be easy.

“Coming back is definitely the hardest thing I’ve had to do in my career,” Votto said. “It’s the sort of thing where you feel like every single article, every question, is painted with a very subtle tone. Your teammates allude to it. You feel it in the lineup construction. Everything feels like it’s trending one way.

“To have the wherewithal to be able to say, ‘No. I’m not going to make the projections they’re making for my life a reality,’ to be able to do that has been the hardest thing to do in my major-league career. And it’s been the most satisfying thing maybe in my life.”

Carpenter burns to experience the same type of satisfaction. If Votto achieved it, perhaps he can, too.

(Top image: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: Getty; Eric Espanda, Joe Robbins & Keith Gillett / Icon Sportswire)