J.D. Martinez Explains Why He Wore The Tom Brady T-Shirt:

BOSTON (CBS) -- When most of America saw a smiling Tom Brady stumble off the pier following the Buccaneers' Super Bowl boat parade, they saw something humorous. J.D. Martinez, though, saw something worth shooting for.

The 33-year-old designated hitter saw Brady's celebration, then saw the T-shirt, and then decided it was a must-have item.

"I just loved it. I saw it and I was like ... this is a great shirt," Martinez told WBZ's Dan Roche on Sports Final. "Like, how can I not wear this? I feel like that's exactly what I want to be like at the end of my season. Right? Getting off the Duck Boat, walking sideways, because you're just enjoying what you did, pretty much, you know? Hard work pays off."

To Martinez, the idea of letting loose after a championship season is the ultimate reward for the work that goes into winning.

"I always say for me, when I go back home, I'm so tired of baseball because it's literally, as soon as February hits, I don't do anything but baseball. It just consumes my mind the whole time," Martinez said. "And as soon as the season ends after those eight months, I don't even want to talk about it. I just want to enjoy, like, it was a good year and that's it, and just let go. That's big for me."

Of course, Martinez experienced that high with the Red Sox, winning the World Series in 2018 and celebrating through the streets of Boston. The past two seasons were not quite as fun, and Martinez is coming off a strange 2020 campaign that saw him hit just .213 with a .680 OPS.

While those numbers were ugly, Martinez looks at it more as a slump than a bad season.

"I feel like it was one of those things where you start off bad, and then you're like well I gotta hurry up, I gotta get going, because [the season] is not that long. And then you kind of start putting all these added pressures on you to like, I gotta step it up, I gotta step it up, and then all of a sudden it's just, I don't know. Nothing worked, it seemed like," he said. "So at the end of the day I don't view it as a season. I know people love to say like, 'Oh you had a bad season last year. What are you going to do?' I didn't have a bad season. I had a bad two months. That's it. It's two months, there's still four more during a regular season, we'd still have 120 games left, a lot of things can happen in those 120."

As you might expect, Martinez is anticipating a much better 2021 season.

"I feel like I'm in a really good spot, honestly," he said. "Obviously we just continue to grind with my swing. I can't sit here and say that it's perfect right now, because I don't think it ever is. I think it's always an adjustment and just always keep chipping away. But I feel a lot more confident today in how I feel than I felt last year before the two-month season."

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