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By Jarrod Prugar
For the Mirror
Mason Martin is no stranger to Altoona having played for the Curve in 2021, but after spending 2022 in Triple-A Indianapolis, Martin was back for this season.
Having said that, Minor League Baseball is very much a place that is all about where you end up and not where you start.
So far, Martin has hit .193 with only 11 home runs. Not numbers that will get him to Indianapolis again, but it's not where you start, it's where you finish.
The aforementioned 11th home run came after nearly a three-week homerless streak for Martin that spanned from June 3 to June 25.
Getting the monkey off his back was imperative to Martin, but so too was finishing the first half of the season strong.
"It definitely felt good," Martin said. "I've spent a lot of trial and error recently just making some adjustments and getting back to what I do well, so it felt really good to get back to that and hitting the ball well."
Trial and error can sometimes be looked at in a multitude of different ways. When the numbers don't look good, it can be easy to focus on the failures rather than the successes.
"It's really easy in this game to just hold on to the failure and it's really easy to look at the failure mainly because that's what most hitters get ourselves into a lot," Martin said. "A lot of failure and so for me, it's just about trying to just highlight the positives and be okay with celebrating when I win and when the team wins."
Baseball is a game of failure. At the MLB level, a person who fails 70 percent of the time is a success, a potential hall of famer even. In the Minors, it's a tad different as far as expectations, but failure is still very prevalent.
"There's a lot of ups and downs in this game but one thing coach Gary Green always tells me, the game is going to keep moving whether you want it to or not," Martin said. "Whether you like it or not, the game is going to keep moving and it doesn't feel sorry for you. I just trying to remind myself of that and, understand that nobody can go out there and do it for me at the end of the day."
Some could've viewed coming to Altoona after spending the past year at a level above a failure, but it's something Martin has embraced since day one, knowing full well it's not about where you start, it's where you finish.
"When I was talking with Pirates' representatives in the spring, they said, it's not about how you start this year, it's about where you finish it," Martin said. "I'm just trying to take those words to heart and just live by that and understand that anything can happen in the second half."
The potential is there as evidenced by his 400-plus foot home run recently against Bowie. For Martin, it's about overcoming those failures, minimizing them and turning them into successes. He could very well make it back to Indianapolis before the season ends.
"It's about just getting good pitches to hit and putting the barrel on the ball and then not worrying too much about trying to cover everything at the plate," Martin said. "I just need to stick to my approach. And see if I can get it working in the second half."