JUPITER, Fla. • The Cardinals, instead of selling Jose Martinez to Japan this past off-season, signed him to a two-year, $3.25 million contract Saturday, taking him through his arbitration year in 2020. And Martinez knows what to do with a lot of that money: Send it to his family and others in strife-torn Venezuela.
The Cardinals were approached about selling the rights to Martinez to a Japanese team this winter. “Obviously, his earning power would have been much higher had we been willing to do that,” said president of baseball operations John Mozeliak. “But we did not feel that it made a lot of sense for us to try to move him.