Detroit Tigers' Victor Martinez 'noticeably stronger,' driving balls

Anthony Fenech, Detroit Free Press Published 7:33 p.m. ET March 3, 2016

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – It’s not just the way Victor Martinez is hitting.

It’s the way he’s moving. Taking ground balls. Walking up to the batter’s box and getting into the batter’s box.

“He’s noticeably stronger,” Tigers manager Brad Ausmus said. “He just look stronger."

That look has been noticeable since the day Martinez arrived in Tiger Town and started swinging on the backfields, drilling baseballs to distances he couldn’t while on a bum left knee last season.

And it was on full display Thursday afternoon at Champion Field, where Martinez continued his hot hitting with his second home run of the spring.

Both have come hitting left-handed. This one came in the fourth inning and went to deep rightfield.

“There’s no question, from day one, we’ve been pinning eyes on Victor not only when he hit but moving around,” Ausmus said. “So far, so good.”

Martinez is coming off the worst season of his career. In 2015, he hit .245 with 11 home runs and 64 RBIs. He returned from a second major knee surgery too quickly and was forced to the disabled list for nearly a month in the first half of the season.

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This season, he is healthy. “I can swing now,” Martinez said. And the evidence isn’t only in the two home runs, but in the way he punched a ball with authority the opposite way on Monday and muscled a pitch up the middle in this first at-bat against the Braves.

He will hit clean-up, Ausmus said, his lefty-hitting presence ever important in the middle of a Tigers lineup stacked with righties. He will once again protect Miguel Cabrera, a task so important that the team gave him a four-year, $68 million extension after the 2014 season.

The topic of lineup protection has been hotly debated throughout baseball but Ausmus, like many other managers, says it’s different with Cabrera.

Martinez is by no means out of the woods: At 37 years old, with those two knee surgeries in his past, the team will always be cautious of “Protecting Victor from Victor,” as Ausmus said multiple times last spring.

But the early returns have been positive, and point to a late-career resurgence for the lifetime .302 hitter in 13 seasons.

“There’s no question a healthy Victor Martinez makes a huge difference,” Ausmus said. “You’re talking about a guy who was second in the MVP voting a year before.

“Now I’m not saying he’s going to be second in the MVP voting, but even if he’s just average Victor Martinez, it’s a huge difference between what we saw last year and when we saw a hobbled Victor Martinez.”