While Delmon Young’s .267/.296/.411 triple slash line left a lot to be desired out of a designated hitter, Martinez has hit even worse in the first month-or-so of the year, managing a line of just .220/.277/.297. There’s good news for V-Mart going forward, however, as it appears that he’s suffered from more than a little bit of bad luck.

May 4, 2013; Houston, TX, USA; Detroit Tigers designated hitter Victor Martinez (41) drives in a run with a double during the first inning against the Houston Astros at Minute Maid Park. Mandatory Credit: Troy Taormina-USA TODAY Sports

The first thing we see is that balls he’s put into play have found their way into fielders’ gloves at a pretty high rate. His batting average on balls in play is a paltry .236. BABIP number doesn’t tell us everything (or anything) by itself, but there are other indicators that he’ll be better in the future than he’s performed to-date this season.

Martinez has a career BABIP of .314 so we would expect his current rate to trend upwards just based on numbers alone, but, more than that, he really has been crushing the ball – it has just been getting caught.

According to a Tweet by ESPN Stats & Info’s Mark Simon, Martinez is one of baseball’s leaders in at-bats ending on hard hit balls. Check it out (click here for the larger image).

Leaderboard alert– A look at Top 25 in % of AB ending in a “hard-hit” ball (last column- WHAV)twitpic.com/coq5si

— Mark Simon (@msimonespn) May 6, 2013

The leader in all of the major leagues is Miguel Cabrera – no surprises there – but what may be surprising based on the raw numbers is that V-Mart is actually fourth below only Cabrera, Edwin Encarnacion, and Carl Crawford. I haven’t actually run any numbers here, but a quick scan tells me that the average player on this top-25 list probably has an OPS in the .800’s.

BABIP alone isn’t going to solve Martinez’s problems entirely – he’s going to need to hit for more power as well – but merely continuing to hit the ball hard is going to lead to a change in fortune for him.

This also means that if you have him in a fantasy league, hold onto him, and if you don’t have him, maybe try to buy low.

Apr 13, 2013; Oakland, CA, USA; Detroit Tigers designated hitter Victor Martinez (41) waits to congratulate infielder Jhonny Peralta (27) next to Oakland Athletics catcher Derek Norris (36) after Peralta hit a home run in the fourth inning at O.Co Coliseum. Mandatory Credit: Cary Edmondson-USA TODAY Sports

Victor Martinez went 1-3 with a walk in Friday’s 8-1 loss to the Los Angeles Angels to raise his batting average to .196 on the season. That average is nowhere close to good, but batting average alone doesn’t tell the whole story.

Martinez’s walk on Friday was his tenth of the season. That’s a notable figure because it’s already half of the walk total that Delmon Young accumulated a season ago. Walks, of course, aren’t everything when it comes to hitting, but they have allowed Martinez to maintain a .313 OBP even though very few of his batted balls are falling in for hits. Young didn’t walk hardly at all and managed only a .297 OBP last year even though his batting average was a better-than-league-average .267.

Martinez’s .313 OBP isn’t necessarily very good — last year the MLB average for non-pitchers was .324 — but it’s allowing him provide even marginal value at the plate while he waits for his hitting fortunes to turn. And we can expect them to. His batting average on balls in play is a very low .212 — a number that will trend north toward his career line of .314.

He’ll start to see balls in play drop for hits and his total batting line will take big jump toward the positive. If we took his current .196/.313/.214 slash line and adjusted his BABIP from .212 to .300, his OBP would soar above .380. And more hits would mean more extra-base hits which would put his OPS well into the mid-to-upper .700′s.

Victor isn’t really finding success at the dish right now, but his plate discipline and excellent eye are allowing him to scrape together some value, and, once the hits come, will allow him to return to being an extremely valuable hitter similar to how he was in 2011.

You know what I’m talking about. When you’re a kid you know that no matter how scary the outside world is, as long as you keep your entire body underneath your blanket you will be protected (Some of us still treat blankets this way).

And that’s what sports do for us. They protect us from a very scary world, albeit momentarily. During a week where it didn’t seem like things could get worse (yet they did) Tigers baseball was a great blanket. But within the blanket, there can be dreams and nightmares. And tonight’s 2-1 win over Seattle was both.

For eight innings it was a baseball fan’s dream. Two strikeout hurlers abused the strike zone and threw pitches as if there wasn’t even a batter in the box. Two runs barely scored in a proverbial game of chicken. Not one, not two, but THREE turned double plays got the Tigers out of a jam.
But then the nightmares started.

The Tigers lineup stalled well after Felix Hernandez retired in the 8th. Jim Leyland sent out Octovio Dotel and kept in Phil Coke to face a righthander before giving the ball to Brayan Villarreal. After Villarreal got himself out of a self-created jam, Leyland handed the ball to Darin Downs who struck out his lone hitter to leave a runner in scoring position stranded. That was just in the 9th and 10th innings. Stuff horror movies are made of.

And there were still four more innings left to play.

Most of the remaining innings were an exercise in futility. Whether it was good pitching or bad hitting (or both) a game that had started out so entertaining was now reaching the point where “the end” was more desirable than “a win.”

Finally came the top of the 14th. A single. A walk. An ill-advised defensive play. And then a ground out to finally score a run and end everything.

Or so we thought.

Sometimes you think you’ve woken up only to realize you’re still lost in your nightmare.

Especially when Dustin Ackley smoked a two-out line drive double into right field and Justin Smoak came rumbling down the third base line.

But the ball got to the plate before Smoak and Brayan Pena held on to it after the collision and everyone could finally breathe a sigh of relief.

The metaphorical blanket could finally be shed for the comfort of a real one.

That’s what the Tigers gave us. That’s what sports gives us. A chance to pull ourselves under the covers and away from all the bad news, even before we go to sleep.

Bullets

• Both teams combined for 40 strikeouts in 14 innings. The Major League record for combined strikeouts was 43. That happened in a 20-inning game.
• At times in this series Prince Fielder has looked like he doesn’t remember how to hit. This is worth repeating: sometimes it’s best to just move beyond a bad streak and not even bother figuring out what went wrong.
• The bullpen situation was nightmarish but based on how the hitters performed; Leyland made all the right moves.
• Seriously, three double plays? Really?
• Victor Martinez’s single to lead off the 14th eventually led to the game-winning run. It was a well-earned hit considering how many times he’s hit the ball square only for it to find someone’s glove. It looks like his swing is there. He just needs some more breaks.
• Also of note: Martinez was the only starter in the game not to strikeout.
• This bares repeating: there were 40 strikeouts combined in this game.