That time J.D. Martinez couldn’t find a college team

Full Account -- a new, narrative podcast from MLB.com that will provide deep dives on baseball’s best stories -- is releasing a series of episodes about the vast impact of the 2009 amateur draft on Tuesday, May 28. One of the episodes will delve into how, long before he became one of the game’s most prominent power hitters, J.D. Martinez fell all the way to the 20th round of that draft. What follows is a small sampling of Martinez’s story. You can subscribe to Full Account here.

The bus arrived back at Charles W. Flanagan High School’s campus in Pembroke Pines, Fla., and the victorious members of the Falcons baseball team -- having just clinched their second straight Class 6A state title -- spilled out into the parking lot.

For many of the seniors on that squad, this was an ending, but it was also a beginning. They had college commitments, a path, a plan. But for a lanky, gangly left fielder named J.D. Martinez, stepping off that bus that late May day in 2006 felt like stepping into a world of confusion. For all he knew, in that moment, the 18-year-old Martinez had just played his last game of organized baseball. He had no idea what was next.

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The Martinez we know now is unrecognizable from the one at Flanagan High School. He hit just one home run his senior year, and, in an area saturated with superb baseball talent, Martinez didn’t separate himself from the pack, from a scouting perspective.

“He’d probably be the third name I’d rattle off on that team [that you’d guess would go pro],” says Eric Cruz, Martinez’s high school infield coach who is now an amateur scout for the D-backs. “He hit in the fifth hole for us. He doesn’t even hit in the five-hole in the big leagues. He’s a three-hole hitter or a cleanup hitter in the bigs.”

There was one team -- the Minnesota Twins -- that showed interest in Martinez that senior year, and they ended up taking him in the 36th round of the Draft. But their only intent with Martinez was to make him a “draft and follow” -- a now-extinct process in which a team takes a player in the late rounds with no intent of offering him a contract immediately but, rather, with the hope of signing him within a year if his performance blossomed at junior college.

Just one problem: Martinez didn’t have a college interested in him.

“The Twins called a bunch of jucos [junior colleges] and nobody wanted me,” Martinez says. “Everybody was full and didn’t have space.”

The Twins weren’t the only ones who tried. A couple weeks earlier, as the Flanagan bus emptied, Cruz had asked Martinez if he was ready and willing to go on a very different kind of road trip.

“What are you doing this weekend?” Cruz asked Martinez.

“Nothing,” Martinez replied.

“I’m going to call some schools and we’re going to go on a trip,” Cruz said, “We’re going to auction you off.”

That weekend, they got in Cruz’s Toyota Corolla and hit the road. Polk State College in Winter Haven. Manatee Community College in Bradenton. Florida State College at Jacksonville. They all had J.D. Martinez -- future Silver Slugger winner, future Hank Aaron Award winner, future World Series champion -- stretch, throw, run a 60 and take BP.

And then they all said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

“I probably did about five or six workouts in two days,” Martinez recalls. “By like the fourth or fifth one, I couldn’t even throw. My arm was just shot. I was letting everything air out. Running, sprinting, hitting. Everybody said, 'Nope, nope.' So why did you even let me try out?”

Martinez did get one bite on that trip. At Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. He worked out in the morning and had an offer by lunch. The cafeteria even had free ice cream. What’s not to like?

Well, there was one little catch. When they got back into Cruz’s car, the coach asked the player what he thought, and Martinez said he really wasn’t interested in becoming a member of the Florida Tech Panthers.

Why? There were very few girls on campus.

“Florida Tech is like an engineering school,” Cruz says with a laugh, “and it was all dudes walking around.”

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After that unsuccessful swing through the Sunshine State, the calendar flipped to June. Scholarships had dried up. The pickings were slimmer than … well, than the bony, teenage version of J.D. Martinez.

Finally, though, Cruz got word of an open tryout at Nova Southeastern University, a private school just a few miles from Martinez’s high school. Martinez showed up, performed well, and had an offer within a day. Granted, it wasn’t much of an offer. Martinez remembers it being around $1,500. It has been reported as $3,000. Whatever it was, the annual tuition was north of $20,000, so the scholarship didn’t go far.

But it was an opportunity at a time when such opportunities weren’t easy for Martinez to find.

“We basically came down to the 11th hour,” Cruz says. “I mean, school started like six weeks later. This was after our season. And he had to go to a workout -- an open tryout for high school kids -- to even be offered a scholarship to a Division 2 school. That’s how insane it was trying to get that kid signed.”

For Martinez, that was merely the beginning of the slights and the struggles. After a successful career at Nova Southeastern -- where he was teammates with fellow future big leaguers Mike Fiers and Miles Mikolas -- he was a 20th round Draft pick by the Houston Astros, who famously released him prior to the 2014 season. Even after he established himself as one of the game’s premier power hitters, Martinez endured a long free agency following the 2017 season before finally agreeing to terms with the Red Sox, the only team that was willing to go to nine figures for him.

“That experience in high school got him angry, and it made him work harder,” Cruz says. “Being drafted in the 20th round infuriated him. And then the Astros releasing him, it was one of those things where now, everybody’s going to pay. That has been his mindset.”