REUNITED ONCE MORE
Red Sox slugger Martinez faces former club in ALCS again with hopes of 2018 repeat
A little more than 10 years ago, J.D. Martinez made his big-league debut with the Astros, and a decade later he’s still trying to win games in Minute Maid Park.
“The motivation is still the same,” Martinez said.
The motivation then was to make a World Series with the Astros, a seemingly impossible task with the pared-down franchise of a decade ago. The motivation now is to make another World Series with the Boston Red Sox, starting with the first two games of the American League Championship Series in Martinez’s old swinging grounds.
“It’s the ALCS — a chance to go to the World Series,” Martinez said. “I don’t know if being mad at a team is more motivation than going to the World Series. The (World Series) is the motivation right now.”
The Red Sox are thrilled to simply have their powerful designated hitter in the lineup to start the ALCS after a sprained ankle caused him to miss the wild-card victory over the New York Yankees, and the opener of the division series against the Tampa Bay Rays.
“It’s doing a lot better, and the swelling has gone down a lot,” Martinez said. “It’s night and day from what it was.”
Martinez, 34, rolled his ankle on second base while heading to the outfield in the middle of the fifth inning in Boston’s regularseason finale at Washington. He wound up benefiting a bit from the unexpected two-game break, in hitting .467 with four RBIs and a home run over the last three games of the ALDS, all Red Sox victories.
“It still hurts,” Martinez said leading up to the ALCS opener. “Certain things, certain movements still bother it, but it’s a lot better than it was (Wednesday) and the day before and the day before that. Since the first day I (returned), it’s a lot better, and that’s all you can ask for.”
When Martinez returned from the freak sprain in the ALDS, he hit sixth for the first time in his four seasons with the Red Sox. He had previously not hit lower than fifth in his time in Boston.
“Then we went out and put up 14 runs,” Martinez said with a smile of Boston’s 14-6 victory in Game 2 of the ALDS. “… Then we went out and put up more runs (and) honestly, I think it’s better, being able to split righty, lefty, righty, lefty … Houston is a very analytical team, and they’re going to be looking for the best matchups constantly.
“And they’re going to have to choose at some point if they want a righty (pitcher) to face Alex Verdugo or a lefty to face either me or (Xander) Bogaerts. They’ve got to bite the bullet somewhere. I think it’s a better lineup for our team.”
Red Sox manager Alex Cora said he first hit Martinez sixth in the lineup “out of necessity” — essentially to see how the ankle would hold up early and then remove him if needed — but then Cora added that he “loved” the new arrangement.
“It’s good balance, with a bunch of athletes in front of him, guys that are getting on at a high rate,” Cora said.
Despite Cora’s love for Martinez’s mashing at sixth in the ALDS, Martinez hit fifth in Game 1 of the ALCS on Friday night at Minute Maid Park — a place especially familiar to Martinez about a decade ago. The Astros in March 2014 released Martinez after he .251 with 24 home runs from 201113 in Houston, and the Astros believed he’d topped out at 26 years old.
In answering the impolite wake-up call from his first bigleague team — the one that drafted him in the 20th round out of Nova Southeastern University — Martinez worked hard in the 201314 offseason to adjust his swing, and he’s since flourished with Detroit, Arizona and Boston.
He signed with the Red Sox in February 2018, and that year helped lead Boston past the Astros in the ALCS. The Red Sox also won the World Series in 2018 over the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Martinez basked in his good timing.
“I learned a lot from Houston,” Martinez told MLB.com that year. “You know what? It made me who I am, and there’s really no animosity there. … They did me a favor by allowing me to leave and go play on another team. If it wasn’t for that, I probably wouldn’t be here right now.
“Who knows where I would have been?”