The Red Sox signed J.D. Martinez to hit for power. He has yet to do so in the early goings, leaving fans wondering if he’s going to look like the guy he was in Detroit and Arizona last year. Should they be concerned?
By most measures, J.D. Martinez is off to a slow start. In eight games he has hit .226/.286/.419 with 1 HR and 4 RBI. Hardly the behemoth slugger Boston Red Sox fans envisioned when he finally signed in late February. Should he fail to start hitting, he wouldn’t be the first high profile signing to bust in Boston. Carl Crawford and Pablo Sandoval both say hello. So should Sox fans be worried about the latest big name to don the uniform?
Putting things into perspective:
While the results are far from pretty to this point in the season, there’s more we can look at than his slash line and counting stats. The most important of these is, arguably, his Statcast data. Over at xStats.org we can sort through things like exit velocity (EV) and launch angle groupings like GB%, LD%, HD%, and FB%.
As I’ve pointed out before, low drives (LD%) and hard drives (HD%) are the two most productive ranges, and fly balls (FB%) are where most home runs come from. Here’s the table I used in that article: