It was a long offseason for Boston Red Sox fans as they waited with bated breath to see if any big moves would be made.
But that wait proved worth it, with the Red Sox signing slugger J.D. Martinez to a five-year deal, and we now have a little bit more insight as to what was going on during that long wait.
Boston’s president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski discussed the process of courting Martinez this offseason with ESPN’s Buster Olney.
“Well this has been a process of course that took a while over the wintertime, but I will say when we had our meetings — which were year-end meetings at the beginning of November last year with all of our scouts and analytics people, front office personnel, Alex Cora being new at the organization at that time when we went over all of our priorities we actually had J.D. as our No. 1 priority to try to pursue as somebody we felt would be a real good fit into our organization,” Dombrowski said.
“A guy that can hit the ball with power and of course that’s something we could use, but also a guy then that could DH play some outfield for us so there was some versatility, and really provide that extra bat for us that we think could lengthen out our lineup, so that meeting took place in November.
“We of course touched base with Scott Boras and his group and really met for the first time a little bit at the general manager meetings in November. But really sat down fact-to-face with members of our organization which were Alex Cora, Jason Varitek, myself, couple other people, Eddie Romero, our assistant general manager, and visited with Scott and J.D. during the Winter Meetings. So we had a real nice conversation then, visited for about an hour. Touched base the next day, really started talking contractually, of course did not go very far at that time. But we did start the negotiations at that point, stayed in contact really over the next couple month period until we finally picked up and progressed going into this past week we were able to get the deal done.”
Interesting.
It certainly was a long process, but one that many free-agent players went through — or are continuing to go through to this day, so it doesn’t necessarily make either side an enigma in the grand scheme of the unusual offseason.
