By the time our March 22 conversation rolled around, there might have been a few signs that J.D. Martinez was becoming his old self, but not a lot.
The Red Sox' designated hitter was on his way to a career-high amount of spring training at-bats, yet had come away with less than a handful of hard-hit baseballs.
Almost every pitch seemed to be on the outside corner and almost every swing seemed ineffectual.
Yet, Martinez clearly knew something we didn't.
"Obviously I'm excited," Martinez told WEEI.com. "I just want (expletive) to go back to normal, honestly. I just want it to be a normal season. I'm kind of tired of being judged on two months."
That was fine. It was impossible to doubt the 33-year-old's frustration considering what that 2020 represented for him. There it was, smack dab in the middle of those years of utter offensive dominance: .213 batting average, .680 OPS and just seven home runs.
He went on to say, "I feel like it's everything. It's constantly being asked by the media, 'J.D., you had a terrible 2020 ...' It's non-stop. Dude, let me grind, let me work. Stop putting the negativity around me. I just want to go out there and hit and do what I know what to do, grind, and get back in the swing of things. Just getting back out there, putting numbers up there again and everyone will say, 'Oh, OK. This is what happened.'"
All together now: "Oh, OK. This is what happened."
Any built-in skepticism regarding Martinez's explanation for those two months last year has been washed away. We get it. Once Spring Training 1.0 broke up and everyone was sent their different ways due to the pandemic, the designated hitter got put down the wrong path. First there was the mandate to sequester himself due to a bad case of asthma, and then the belief there simply wouldn't be a season.
Simply put, he got into some bad habits.
But, even after his explanations, benefit of the doubt was hard to find. Now it's not. We have all been reminded of what both Martinez and spring training represent.
Heading into the Red Sox' series in Minnesota, only one player in baseball (the Twins Byron Buxton) has a better OPS than J.D. Martinez (1.583), with nobody collecting as many total bases (39) or extra-base hits (12) as the Sox' DH.
By the way, Buxton's spring training numbers -- .135 batting average, .492 OPS -- were also miserable.
Lessons learned.
"He’s locked in, you can tell," said Red Sox manager Alex Cora after watching Martinez hit three home runs in their team's 14-9 win over the Oriole.
"Walking around talking hitting. This is a guy I saw in ‘18 and ‘19, he has an idea of what he wants to do. He doesn’t deviate from his process. I think the last swing I think he was just hoping for a strike and hit it in the air but that wasn’t the case but he studies himself, he studies the opposition and he’s in a good place. He finished spring training the right way, getting his hits to right field, driving in in runs and he’s in a great place right now. I still believe that -- I know he talked about last year and he’s on a mission to prove people wrong but it was only 60 games. He was one month away from getting his numbers right. Right now he’s locked in and I’m glad he’s swinging the bat the way he is."
“I don’t know. No idea," said Martinez when asked about the last time he was in this kind of groove. "I think i’ve been in a zone like this in spring training, back in 2014, I think, but that was about it.”
Whatever the case, only one person truly might have saw the coming: J.D. Martinez. We should have listened.
