As another baseball spring approaches, J.D. Martinez is once again looking for a new team. It’s happened to him before at this time of year.
There have been reports recently that the Mets are interested in Martinez as a DH for them this season, and as another right-handed power bat they could very much use. The Mets aren’t the only ones who ought to be interested in Martinez. Because he has primarily been a DH for a while, you hear that all he does is hit. But the reality with Martinez, one of the great stories in baseball over the past decade, is that all he’s done since leaving the Astros 10 years ago is hit.
Martinez, who is 36 years old, has hit and hit for power wherever he’s played. And knocked in runs. Along the way, with the 2018 Red Sox, he won a World Series and was in some ways as valuable to them that season as Mookie Betts, who did win the American League MVP Award.
Mookie hit .346 with 32 homers and 80 RBIs and scored 129 runs for the ’18 Sox. He had an on-base percentage of .438, slugged .640 and had an OPS of 1.078. Of course, he was brilliant in the outfield, a streak of light there and everywhere else. But in that same season, Martinez won Silver Sluggers as both a DH and outfielder (he had 57 starts in the outfield), hit 43 home runs, knocked in 130 and scored 111 runs himself. His on-base was .402, he slugged .629 and his OPS was 1.031.
So that was Martinez's ’18, four years after the Astros gave him just 18 at-bats in Spring Training before releasing him. The Tigers signed him because Al Avila, then Detroit’s general manager, remembered Martinez from when he’d played college ball at Nova Southeastern in Fort Lauderdale with Al’s son Alan.
Martinez showed up in Detroit with a new swing and a new lease on his baseball life, and became the next generation’s David Ortiz, who was once let go by the Twins before becoming one of the game’s elite sluggers and all-time great DHs.
Over the past 10 seasons, Martinez has hit a total of 291 home runs for the Tigers, the Diamondbacks, the Red Sox and the Dodgers. That averages out to 29 a year. He hit 33 for the Dodgers last season in just 113 games. He also knocked in 103 runs, which nearly averages out to one per game. He was working on a one-year, $10 million contract, which made him a relative bargain.
Now, all this time after the arc of Martinez’s career was altered forever because the Astros did release him in Spring Training, he is once again looking for a job as Spring Training ’24 is about to begin. The difference this time is that he has so much more of a resume than he did when he left Houston. By the way? When he did get with the Tigers that spring, his new team played his old team. Martinez gave everybody a heads-up on things to come by hitting three home runs that day.
“People are always asking if I was mad at Houston,” Martinez said once. “Honestly, I'm not. The truth of the matter is that when I was there, I didn't perform and they actually did me a favor by cutting me loose. They could have really held me there, not let me leave, bury me in Triple-A, put me behind some prospects and I would never even play.”
The Astros didn’t hold on to him. Didn’t try to bury him in Triple-A. Former Astros GM Jeff Luhnow once told me that he called around to everybody in the game trying to find interest in Martinez at the time. He said “crickets” was the response. But Al Avila remembered the kid who’d played with his son in college. The rest really is history.
In a way, history is repeating itself now. Maybe it will turn out that the Mets don’t see Martinez as a fit for them. They obviously have right-handed power from Pete Alonso, who has hit more home runs than anybody in baseball since his rookie season. They have sky-high hopes for their kid catcher, Francisco Alvarez, coming off a season when he hit 25 homers in 123 games. They have Francisco Lindor, a switch-hitter, and Brandon Nimmo and Jeff McNeil, a former batting champ, from the left side. But it sure would seem that Martinez, just off what we saw from him with the Dodgers last season, would be a perfect fit in Carlos Mendoza’s batting order.
The Mets can use more power. J.D. Martinez has always been able to supply that. All he does is hit. One more Spring Training where he’s waiting to see where he does it next.