J.D. fixes ‘logjam’ in swing
Sox slugger says he has ‘chip on my shoulder’ after down season
When J.D. Martinez was released by the Astros in 2014, the designated hitter used it as fuel to make himself into a three-time AllStar, World Series champion and one of the best hitters in the game.
Seven years later, Martinez has a new reason to prove himself.
After the worst season of his big-league career in 2020, batting .213 with seven homers and 27 RBI in 54 games, Martinez is motivated to return to his All-Star form. And as spring training begins in Fort Myers, the 33-year-old is vowing he won’t let something like last season happen again.
“I think I’ve got a little bit of a chip on my shoulder,” Martinez said. “I’ve always played with that, I’ve always played with that chip, having to prove people wrong my whole career. It kind of might have went away a little bit, but I think I’ve got it back a little bit now.”
Martinez admitted most of his struggles last year were self-inflicted. After spring training paused in mid-March due to the pandemic, there was great uncertainty about if and when a season would commence, and Martinez let it impact his work. When the Red Sox returned to Boston to prepare for a 60-game season in July, Martinez was well behind.
“It was one of those things that I felt like I really wasn’t prepared for last year,” Martinez said. “I feel like it kind of caught me offguard, with whether we were going to play, whether we weren’t. I kind of went back to doing the same thing I always do, staying ready, staying prepared for the whole season like I usually do. …
“Last year when they shut down spring training it was one of those things where like, are we going to play, are we not? … It’s my fault, I take accountability for that, because I didn’t stay ready. This year I say to myself, they’re not getting me again. They’re not catching me off-guard. So I stayed ready the whole time.”
When last season ended, Martinez said he would go back to the lab this winter to correct his issues from last year, and that’s exactly what he did. He trained with a group of people, including some of his old college coaches and friends, and they sometimes worked full days in pursuit of identifying what went wrong for Martinez in 2020.
Martinez didn’t get into specifics about what he found and how he fixed it, but it was a long process, one that he came away from encouraged and feeling good about going into spring training.
“I created some really, really bad habits in my swing and I didn’t even notice it at the time,” Martinez said. “It kind of just took me a while to figure out what was the actual cause of it. What was causing this move that I was making. I literally spent a lot of time on it, trying new things in the cages. …
“That first week we kind of grinded out a lot of things that we thought were the problems and just to realize most of them weren’t, the problems were coming from something else, so I think once we started fixing, it was almost like a logjam. Once you move one log, everything started flowing again, so that’s kind of where we were at. …
“It’s something I have to continue to work on and continue to grind. I can’t sit here and say, ‘Yeah guys, I fixed it, I’m back.’ Because it’s not like that, it’s not baseball. The moment you feel like you figured it out, this game humbles you real quick. So it’s one of those things where I have to keep working on and stick to the process.”
Martinez had also voiced his displeasure for a lack of access to in-game video last season, which hampered his routine. But some form of in-game video is expected to return in 2021, which Martinez said he’s excited about.
Either way, the Red Sox are expecting a big bounceback season from Martinez, who was an All-Star in his first two seasons with the Red Sox. Alex Cora isn’t worried at all about his DH.
“Obviously everybody is going to point out last year. I still believe this guy, he’s capable of doing damage,” Cora said. “He’s a proud individual. Over the course of his career he’s proved people wrong so like I’ve been saying all along, it’s not going to be a surprise for me when he goes out there and produces like he’s capable of.”