One of the biggest storylines of tonight’s Red Sox-Yankees AL Wild Card is J.D. Martinez, who won’t be playing due to a rolled ankle. This video below shows how the Boston slugger hurt it:
JD Martinez won’t be playing in the Wild Card game tonight because he did this over the weekend pic.twitter.com/H6oWnRrkN5
— MLB Errors (@mlberrors) October 5, 2021
Martinez grinded out the inning, but then was removed from Sunday’s Red Sox-Nationals, before the Sox clinched the Wild Card spot. They host the Yankees tonight with first pitch at 8:08 p.m. EST.
“But for him not to post, it’s very serious,” Sox manager Alex Cora said. “It is what it is. That thing looks huge. Humongous. He’ll get treatment today and we’ll go from there. But for tonight, it was a no.”
Cora said Martinez has been stepping on the bag for his entire career when running out to his position.
“Obviously we know what he means to us and the fact that he cannot play today is a tough one,” said Cora. “But at the same time, they got some guys over there that they’re banged up. They’re not part of it. And I think this is the grind of 162 games. The way it happened, I mean, J.D. has been stepping on that bag for ten years. It just happened that he slipped and he’s out now.”
The Red Sox, without Martinez, made some lineup changes.
“But we made some adjustments lineup-wise,” added the manager. “We do believe that we created some balance with the adjustments that we made. I don’t know what he said about it. But it’s just this is where we’re at. And it just happened that now Kyle is going to lead off and Kiké (Hernández) is going to hit second and Xander (Bogaerts) is going to hit behind (Rafael) Devers, which is very important for us.”
(Photo of J.D. Martinez by Rob Carr/Getty Images)