Why the Mets' J.D. Martinez doesn't want to be a hitting coach in the future
The Mets' J.D. Martinez follows through with his swing after connecting for an RBI double off Colorado Rockies pitcher Austin Gomber in the first inning of a game on Thursday in Denver. Credit: AP/David Zalubowski
SEATTLE — So respected a hitting mind is J.D. Martinez that the question has come regularly through the years, from coaches and teammates and others: When he is done playing, might he want to be a hitting coach?
Martinez scoffs, then smiles.
“No. No. No. Everybody asks me that,” he said recently. “It’s the worst job in the league . . . They’re a freaking therapist, mental coach, hitting coach, mechanical [swing expert]. It’s like six in one. You’re in the cage all day. They don’t pay enough for that.”
OK, then.
“It’s one of those things where it’s just like: I’m in the cage, I gotta handle 13 different personalities and 13 different swings,” Martinez continued, clarifying that hitting coach actually is the second-worst job in the game behind reliever who shuttles between the majors and minors. “It’s a tough job. I feel bad for them sometimes. It’s nonstop. If you don’t get hits, they get blamed for it. Wait, what?”
And what about when the players do hit?
“Then they don’t get [credit] for it,” Martinez said. “They’re supposed to hit. It’s a lose-lose. It’s the worst gig. I’m telling you, I’ve seen it. I feel bad for them.”
Of the Mets’ two hitting coaches, Jeremy Barnes and Eric Chavez, the latter is similar to Martinez in that he played in the majors for a long time (17 seasons), won some awards, made good money.
What does Chavez think of Martinez’s take that hitting coach is a tough gig, maybe the worst?
“Totally agreed,” Chavez said, laughing.
For Chavez, who has served in that role two of the past three seasons (with a stint as bench coach in between), being a hitting coach is “just kind of where I’m at right now,” he said. He hopes it is a “steppingstone” to becoming a manager, aspirations he has been up front about since before joining the Mets.
In the meantime, he is happy to have this job, but Martinez is right, Chavez said: It’s a grind.
“It’s not a job that I want to do for a really long time,” Chavez said. “In football, if you’re the offensive coordinator, you have a big say in what happens. In baseball, it’s a little bit, but . . . somehow you have to match up team goals, organizational goals, personal goals and then whatever you bring to the table. That’s four different things you have to navigate. So it’s not easy.
“And I’ve told [hitters], too, you’ve got to own your career. You’re responsible for what you do, who you listen to, what you want to try to do — what type of hitter you want to be. I’ll go down any rabbit hole you want to go down. I’m not going to sit here and tell you do this, do that. I’m here to navigate what you want to accomplish. And then, obviously, with the organizational goals and what they have in mind for you, try to mesh that.”
Martinez, who will turn 37 this month, is having another strong season, including a solidly-above-average .788 OPS with 12 homers and 53 RBIs entering play Saturday.
But he didn’t sign with the Mets until near the end of spring training, ending a prolonged free agency. He knows the end of his playing career is approaching. He figures he’ll want to stick around the game in some capacity once he stops swinging a bat, but that won’t take the form of helping others swing it — probably.
“Who knows?” he said. “Maybe down the road I’ll get bored. I definitely want to do something around baseball.”
Tim Healey is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. Born on Long Island and raised in Connecticut, Tim has previously worked for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Boston Globe and MLB.com. He is also the author of “Hometown Hardball,” a book about minor league baseball in the northeast.
