by
Victor Martinez
Victor Martinez had the best season of his career in 2014.
He walloped more than 30 home runs (32) for the first time in his career. He led the American League in on-base percentage. He hit a blistering .335, second best in all of baseball. And he finished as runner-up to Mike Trout for AL MVP honors.
Like a nice Merlot, Martinez seemed to be getting significantly better with age. So even though he entered this 2015 campaign as a 36-year-old coming off knee surgery, the expectation was that Victor would get himself ready and return to last summer’s form.
Unfortunately for the Tigers, this has not gone at all according to plan. In fact, it’s been the polar opposite. Martinez is struggling like never before and nobody seems to know exactly what the next move should be.
Martinez has played in 25 of the team’s 27 games, which would lead you to believe he was healthy. But he can’t be. Not with numbers like this.
No Home Runs
He doesn’t have a home run. Not a single long ball. And remember, he clocked 32 just a year ago.
His batting average rests at a shocking .203. The guy is a lifetime .305 batter.
Victor has come to the plate 95 times this season. Only once has the end result been him standing on a base other than first, a lone double against the White Sox on April 19th. In the 15 ballgames since, the hobbled slugger has registered a .140 average with not an ounce of power.
He took the field as a defender 37 times last year. He’s yet to do so in 2015.
The question becomes, “Why not send Victor Martinez to the DL?” Give him a couple of weeks, maybe a month, to rest that balky knee and see if he comes back with some renewed strength and mobility.
Remember, it’s not as if the Tigers don’t have some margin for error here. The MLB regular season is not what it once was, when each game, be it April or September, carried with it significant meaning. Now the stakes are lower.
The Tigers will battle with the Royals this summer and it’ll provide a little excitement, but reaching the playoffs will just require that Detroit stay ahead of middling clubs like the Angels, Orioles, and Mariners. Neither of last year’s World Series participants, the Royals or Giants, took home a regular season flag. They both finished out of the money, won their play-in game, and were no worse for the wear.
What's the Urgency?
It’s part of what makes this insistence on trotting Victor Martinez out there day after day so puzzling. Why the extreme urgency in the first and second months of a watered-down regular season?
If it was just a matter of going through an ordinary baseball slump, and it was not related to any type of injury, of course you’d let a guy with Victor’s credentials fight his way out of it. But in this case, the evidence would suggest otherwise.
He does not look comfortable in the box. He definitely does not appear comfortable getting out of the box. And while it remains uncertain if a short respite will be the magic elixir that gets Martinez back on track, there’s certainly no downside to finding out for sure.
Brad Ausmus can continue to pencil Martinez into that DH slot, continue to plug him in the all-important cleanup spot, but it won’t make a whole lot of sense.
At this point, the logical thing to is give the old guy a break. Sit him down for as long as he needs. If that means he is unavailable until after the All-Star break, so be it. Neither Martinez nor the Tigers are benefiting from this play-through-pain exhibition.
There are 135 more baseball games remaining in the 2015 regular season, then a few more weeks of playoffs to follow. It is far from imperative that Victor Martinez keep toughing it out just a few months removed from a knee operation.
And that would be the case even if he were off to a super fast start and sending lasers all over the diamond. It’d still be prudent to temper his playing time and ensure August/September/October health over anything else. But when you take into consideration that his production at the plate has been akin to that of a National League pitcher, it becomes obvious that the only play here is a detour to the disabled list for an undetermined amount of time.
The Tigers need Victor Martinez to be a World Series contender, but they need the Victor that is a five-time All-Star, the Victor that has batted over .300 each of the last five years.
The guy that’s out there now? That’s not Victor Martinez. He looks like him, he wears the same number, but he’s not the same guy.
The franchise needs to look closely at the baseball calendar and understand that the heat need not be ratcheted up for quite a while.
You don’t win a marathon by expending all your energy in the first few miles.
And you surely don’t win it with a knee wailing in pain.
