Víctor Martínez Marquee

In 2014 he hit .335 with 32 home runs and 103 runs batted in and struck out 42 times in 641 plate appearances, walking 70. In the twenty-five years before it, only Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield and Moisés Alou had hit 30 home runs in a season while striking out 45 times or fewer, and nobody has done it since. He was thirty-five and had missed the whole of 2012 with a torn knee ligament.

Sixteen seasons gave him 2,153 hits, 246 home runs, 1,178 runs batted in, 423 doubles and a .295 average, with five All-Star selections and two Silver Sluggers won eleven years apart. He was a catcher for the first half of the career, in Cleveland and Boston, and a designated hitter for the second, in Detroit.

He was Venezuelan, signed at seventeen, and switch-hit for all of it. The knee that cost him 2012 is also why he stopped catching, and the bat was good enough that it did not much matter. He got six votes of 385 in 2024.