As first impressions go, J.D. Martinez’s is right up there

Just under 100 games remain in this Red Sox season, so it’s still too soon to make any declarative proclamations about the successes and failures of specific players – other than the dismissed Hanley Ramirez, I suppose.

The epilogue and eulogy on his three-plus years here: He was occasionally excellent, usually wasn’t, and is now stranded in baseball purgatory while assorted other teams sort out whether they want him to become their enigma. We’ll hear from him again, but who knows if it will matter. Roll credits.

Now that it’s popped into my head, there is at least one other player – one actually still with the Red Sox and batting in the heart of the order just about every day – whose status as a success or failure in 2018 is already obvious and irrefutable.

J.D. Martinez, signed to a five-year, $110 million free agent contract in February after an exceptional 2017 season split between Detroit and Arizona, was brought to Boston to put a charge back in a lineup that suffered a major power outage – a league-worst 168 homers – last season.

Well, if you’ve been paying attention, you know how that has gone. His OPS is lower than it was a season ago. So is his slugging percentage. And his on-base percentage? Yep, also down from ‘17. His batting average is slightly higher, but batting average is stat for sabermetric philistines and out-of-touch old timers, or so my younger friends tell me.

Sixty-two games into Martinez’s Red Sox career, it’s clear what’s happening here. All of those Twitter chirpers and sports-radio caterwaulers who insisted Martinez, an over-30, once-released late bloomer, wasn’t a difference-maker were right again. Go ahead and take your victory lap in between the 20 fat-loss ads your station squeezes into an hour.

[Pause for a beat.]

That’s sarcasm, for those of you Internet dwellers who have lost the ability to detect it in the written word. Though I might have underestimated the sheer number of fat-loss ads.

Martinez has been the type of fastball-mashing middle-of-the-order difference-maker the Red Sox have sorely lacked since … well, since David Ortiz retired two years ago. Martinez has 20 home runs in the 59 games he has played, or four fewer than 2017 team leader Mookie Betts had in 153 games last season. As the excellent Red Sox website Over The Monster noted Thursday, he’s well on his way to submitting the 19th 40-home-run season in franchise history.

I wasn’t lying when I said his OPS, slugging, and OBP were down — but the catch is that they’re down from stratospheric to slightly less stratospheric levels. Last season, he slashed .303/.376/.690, with 45 homers. This year, he’s at .317/.375/.652. Some of us around here (ahem) pined for years for Giancarlo Stanton to join the Red Sox. Martinez has been a superior version so far at a lesser cost.

We’re pretty blessed around here when it comes to sluggers, and Martinez has made as good a first impression as any of them. I may be missing an old-timer or two here, but my memory goes back to 1978, and I can recall just two accomplished hitters who made as great of a first impression upon joining the Red Sox as Martinez has. The two:

■ Manny Ramirez, 2001: Martinez lacks the goofy charisma of Manny Being Manny, but he sure is reminiscent of him as a hitter right now, and Manny is the best righthanded hitter I’ve ever seen. He may never have been better than he was during the honeymoon of his first few months with the Red Sox. On June 7 in 2001, Manny was hitting .381 with a .466 OBP and a .712 slugging percentage. Holy smokes.

■ Adrian Gonzalez, 2011: It’s easy to forget how good he was with the Red Sox because he departed in ’12 with the reputation as a loathsome managing partner in a locker room of clubhouse lawyers … but he was really good with the Red Sox, especially at the beginning. On June 26 that season, he was slashing .361/.415/.611, and he finished the first half with 77 RBIs.

That’s it. Ramirez and Gonzalez. Beyond that twosome, I can’t think of anyone else who was as outstanding at punishing the baseball from his get-go with the Red Sox as 2018 J.D. Martinez has been. (I’m pretending the brief Carl Everett appreciation society never existed, FYI.)

All of this must certainly must be an eye-opener for those who didn’t want him because they didn’t really know anything about him.

Ignorance made it easy to write off his success the last four years with Detroit and Arizona as a fluke, rather than reading up and realizing his discipline and dedication to gathering data and knowledge has fueled his ascent.

What a pleasant surprise he must be to those who shunned every compelling clue about how dominant he had become. Assuming, that is, that they are incapable of embarrassment.