Blue Jays Video
Question marks surround Orelvis Martinez. They start with his 80-game suspension for failing a performance enhancing drug test, which was announced just three days after he made his big league debut in June. They continue onto the field. Martinez’s defense is far from a sure thing. He’s an infielder who’s spent time at second, short, and third over his six years in the minors, but he still doesn’t have a position. His plate discipline is equally concerning. In 2024, his 30% chase rate put him in the 32nd percentile of triple-A batters (minimum 500 pitches outside the zone), and his 35% whiff rate put him in the 12th percentile (minimum 1,000 total pitches). Simply put, Martinez may well chase too much and whiff too much to ever be a productive big leaguer.
That’s a whole lot of uncertainty, but one thing has never been in doubt: Martinez can crush a baseball. He hit at least 28 home runs in his last three full minor-league seasons, and he hit 17 over just 74 games in 2024. On Saturday, in the Blue Jays’ spring training opener against the Yankees, he wielded that power to give us a reminder of why all those question marks might be worth the worry, sending a Brandon Leibrandt fastball over the right center field fence.
The 105.6-mph exit velocity was notable, especially for a line drive opposite-field shot that traveled 389 feet. That’s just not something every player can do.
Although the trade for Andrés Giménez closed off one potential avenue for Martinez, the Blue Jays’ third base situation is still very much unsettled, with Ernie Clement seeming to be the leading contender. Designated hitter is even more wide open. If Martinez keeps hitting in spring training, if he looks like he could pass for any kind of defender, the Blue Jays won’t have much choice but to roster him and let him swing for the fences. After signing as an international free agent in 2018, Martinez is 23 years old with 455 minor league games under his belt. At some point, he’ll have to get his shot against big league pitching, and the Blue Jays don’t exactly have him blocked.
The projection systems are nearly unanimous in their view of Martinez. They see him putting up a wRC+ right around 90 in 2024 – 10% worse than the average hitter – blasting plenty of home runs, but striking out more than a quarter of the time. The one projection system that sees Martinez blowing those expectations out of the water is OOPSY, Jordan Rosenblum’s new system that pegs Martinez for a 107 wRC+, enough to make him a solid regular even if his defense underwhelms. Why does OOPSY love Martinez? Because it incorporates a lot of the newly available exit velocity and bat tracking data, and if there’s one thing Martinez can do, it’s generate bat speed. In other words, OOPSY is excited about him for all the same reasons that we are.
It’s hard to know what to expect from Martinez. Plate discipline numbers tend to be very predictive. Players just don’t massively improve their ability to lay off bad pitches or make contact out of nowhere. If he’s going to make it with the Jays, Martinez will have to keep mashing enough homers to offset the strikeouts and the lack of walks. So far, he’s done that at every level of the minors, and he’s unlikely to get a better chance in the majors than the one he has right now.
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