J.D. Martinez Stages Moment Of The Tigers Season

By Will Burchfield
Twitter: burchie_kid

We are reminded of baseball's infinite possibility on nights like these.

J.D. Martinez hadn't played all night. Here he was, pinch-hitting in the bottom of the eighth. He hadn't faced a big-league pitcher in over a month. Here he was, digging in against Chris Sale.

He hadn't even taken a breath. Here he was, swinging at the first pitch he saw.

And there it went, soaring through the hot summer air and toward the center-field fence. It carried and carried, a high, arching fly ball, a distant meteor streaking toward the impossible. Its fate felt undecided as it fell from the sky, drama pulling it one way, logic pulling it the other.

Then it disappeared into the shrubs some 430 feet away as the fans roared in delirium and the Tigers high-fived in glee and Comerica Park shook like it hasn't shaken all year.

"That was probably the coolest moment of my career right there," Martinez said afterward.

His incredibly clutch, impossibly dramatic go-ahead home run gave the Tigers a 2-1 lead they wouldn't relinquish. It was the defining moment in the team's eighth consecutive win and the absolute high of this rollercoaster season.

"It was something in the past four months I've been on this club that I haven't seen the crowd get into a game like that," said Francisco Rodriguez, who escaped a bases-loaded jam in the ninth to nail down the save.

When Martinez strolled to the plate, Rodriguez had just begun warming up in the Tigers' bullpen. Moments later, amid the summer pandemonium, he was bursting with enough adrenaline to throw a ball through the backstop.

"It was special, it was awesome, the momentum," he said. "Obviously after he hit that ball, the crowd was…electric. It took me only five pitches to get ready after that."

While K-Rod was getting loose, Mike Aviles was in the tunnel between the clubhouse and the dugout preparing for his next at-bat. The moment he heard Martinez connect on Sale's pitch, Aviles' eyes flashed to the nearby video screen.

"Our video guy stood up and he's like, 'GET OUT! GET OUT!' and we're both yelling, 'GET OUT!' and the next thing you know it goes out," Aviles laughed. "I don't even know who ran out of the room first but it was like full sprint up there to the [dugout] to go meet him."

As stunning a moment as it was, Aviles wasn't surprised that Martinez pulled it off. He is one of the Tigers' must studious hitters, notoriously diligent in his preparation. So when the ball sailed over the center-field wall, it wasn't disbelief or shock running through Aviles' mind.

"It's 'scream!' it's "Let's go!' it's high-fives. It's were going to get excited because we're up right now and we're playing a really good team with a really good pitcher on the mound," Aviles said.

Taken together, Rodriguez and Aviles have played for eight different teams over 24 MLB seasons. And neither one of them can recall a player returning from the disabled list in such dramatic fashion.

"I mean, in all honesty, not like that, because usually when you come off the D.L. or you come back, you're starting," said Aviles. "So you've seen more guys have a complete game or things like that."

K-Rod was similarly stumped. And though he vowed to think it over and "do some homework" when he got home, it's unlikely he will come up with an answer. Moments like these are short on precedent.

Let's re-set the stage.

Martinez was appearing in his first big-league game after spending well over a month on the disabled list. He was pinch-hitting in the eighth inning of a 1-1 tie, opposed by one of the best pitchers in the world. He swung at the very first pitch he saw and drilled a mammoth home run to the deepest part of the ballpark. He lifted his team to its eighth win in a row.

Are we missing anything?

"The wind was blowing in a little bit," Brad Ausmus pointed out.

Add it all up, and the manager said it was "almost a perfect scenario."

For Martinez, there wasn't a grander way to stage his return. The 28-year-old slugger had been sidelined for most of the Tigers' current surge, frustrated by his inability to join the cause. Thrust into the thick of things on Wednesday night, he stamped his name in bold ink on this eight-game win streak.

Afterward, Martinez said the whole experience felt surreal, from the crowd's reaction when he entered the game to his epiphany at the plate to the scene in the ballpark when he was rounding the bases. And the way each moment led to the next.

"I wasn't expecting to get that kind of ovation that they gave me when I was walking in – that was awesome. If I could thank the fans individually, I'd thank 'em," he smiled.

Moved by their show of support, the giddy Martinez threw his normally pragmatic hitting approach to the wind.

"In my mind I had my plan off of [Sale] and then I got caught up in the moment," he admitted. "I was like, you know what, forget this. Just see ball, hit ball."

And there it was.

"I saw it nice and slow, and I just said this is it," he explained.

The next thing Martinez knew he was racing around the bases and hardly touching the ground, his teammates exalting on the top step of the dugout, the fans trembling in joy.

"When you get the crowd into it, it just makes it that much more special. I mean, that's what you play for," he said.

"That's why you always hear guys in here stressing it's about the fans, stressing we want the fans to be in it," Martinez continued. "Because when they're in it, you kind of live up to it."

Baseball, more than any other sport, is a game of unpredictability. Every single play carries a trove of possible outcomes. And though most of them are routine and easily classified - F8, 4-3, 2B - the endlessness of this possibility means the unprecedented is always in play. The extraordinary is ever at hand.

Martinez proved that again on Wednesday night, staging a moment that eluded the scope of a score card.

Written down as "HR," it will live on in our minds as so much more.