Victor Martinez..Boston Red Sox Catcher For A LONG Time

The Boston Red Sox full-time catcher, Victor Martinez, had a sit down with the Boston Herald's great sportswriter Michael Silverman and was outspokenly adamant about this. He wants to avoid free agency and STAY with his Boston club. Hey, that's just fine with me. Here are a few of his syllables, in fact, a lot of 'em...

“A lot of guys like to be free agents, but I’m going to be really honest on this answer,” Martinez said last week. "I don’t want to be jumping around, I don’t want to go somewhere else,” Martinez continued. "I came to the place where a lot of players dream to come and a lot of players wish to play here in Boston. So I’m here, I do really want to stay here and hopefully end my career in Boston. Maybe the Red Sox want to see me play a full year as catcher, but remember: my whole career is as a catcher. Everything I’ve done is as a catcher. But I don’t know what’s going to happen. Like I said, I don’t really want to be a free agent. If they give me a chance to be a free agent, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

And then he spoke of the team's captain, Jason Varitek, with glowing words...

“He was generous,” Martinez said. “To be honest again, I never thought that he was going to be that helpful for me. I started taking a little more of his playing time, little by little. I got more comfortable with the pitching staff because of him. He was a guy who came to me and said, ‘If this guy struggles, call this pitch, that will relax him a little bit.’ Man, he was great.”

Hey VMART, you're great! Expect Victor to catch roughly four or five out of every seven games with 'Tek handling it a couple times per week. After all, Martinez batted .336 with eight homers and 41 RBI in his 56 games with the Red Sox. Not shabby, not shabby at all. The guy can hit AND he can play his position. With Varitek there to share his knowlege, well, that's a winning combination for the Boston Red Sox and Martinez. I predict (gulp) that Boston will agree with him on a contract extension well before free agency looms. They're NOT going to shell out the big bucks for Minnesota's soon-to-be free agent catcher, Joe Mauer. Quite possibly, Mauer is the best player in all of baseball and he'll command huge piles of thousand dollar bills after the 2010 season.

That's it for this President's Day, Monday, February 15th, 2010. If you have the day off from work or school, ENJOY IT!. You can click on this post's title to be zapped to SI dot com's coverage of the Olympics and as always, BE WELL. I'll see you soon and if you'd like (please), leave a comment.