McAdam: J.D. Martinez flirting with history - on two counts

The 2018 season has almost exactly five weeks remaining, but were it to end today, Red Sox slugger J.D. Martinez would be one home run shy of winning the triple crown.

After sitting out Sunday's 9-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays, Martinez leads the American League in batting average (.337) and RBI (110) and sits one homer behind Oakland's Khris Davis for home run lead (Davis has 39; Martinez 38).

Should Martinez maintain his lead in batting average and RBI and overtake Davis -- and everyone else -- in homers, he would become just the second major leaguer this century to win the Triple Crown and only the fourth in the post-expansion era to lead his league in three offensive categories.

Detroit's Miguel Cabrera was the last player to win the Triple Crown in either league in 2012 when he hit .330 with 44 homers and 139 RBI. Cabrera was the first major leaguer to earn such a distinction since the Red Sox' Carl Yastrzemski 45 years earlier in 1967. Baltimore's Frank Robinson had won the Triple Crown the previous season.

No National Leaguer has won the Triple Crown since Joe Medwick in 1937, some 81 seasons ago.

Indeed, only 15 individuals have ever captured the honor, reflecting how difficult the feat is.

But that's only one of the historic feats Martinez is chasing.

Martinez also leads all of baseball with 312 total bases. That gives him at least an outside shot to reach the magical 400 total bases mark, something no American Leaguer has accomplished since Red Sox outfielder Jim Rice in 1978. Before that, the last American League hitter to reach 400 bases was Joe DiMaggio, who had 418 in 1937.

In the American League, that's it: DiMaggio and Rice are the only two to reach 400 bases since 1937, a period covering 81 seasons.

For whatever reason, the feat has been far more common in the National League, though it, too, went through a long period without anyone reaching that plateau. After Hank Aaron totaled exactly 400 bases in 1959, no one in the NL matched or exceeded until 1997, 48 years later.

Then, in a strange statistical quirk, it happened seven times in the span of the span of five seasons, including, incredibly, four different players reaching 400 or more total bases in the same season in 2001.

But of the seven instances in which a player got to 400 total bases, three featured a player for the Colorado Rockies (Larry Walker in 1997 and Todd Helton, who did it back-to-back in 2000 and 2001), who play their home games in Coors Field, a ballpark which notoriously inflates offensive numbers.

The other four times, it involved three players -- Barry Bonds in 2001, Luis Gonzalez in 2001 and Sammy Sosa in 1998 and 2001 -- who have been linked to PED use.

Given those qualifiers, Martinez could become the first hitter in either league to reach the 400 total bases threshold who didn't play half his games in Coors Field, or without being linked to PED use.

It will not be easy for Martinez. The Red Sox have 30 games remaining and Martinez needs at least 88 total bases in that span.

That translates into an average of 2.93 per game. To date, Martinez has averaged 2.36 total bases per game.

But a hot streak could change things in a hurry for Martinez, who typically hits his homers in bunches. If Martinez were to hit, say, 12 more homers this season, giving him an even 50 for the year, that would get him to 360 total bases. Another 10 doubles would bring that total to 380, meaning he would need only another 20 singles the rest of the way to get to 400.

One advantage Rice had in 1978 was the fact that he hit 15 triples, providing 45 total bases alone. But Martinez, who has just one triple to date and has never hit more than three in any one season, can't reasonably expect that three-base hits will help his cause the rest of the way.

To be sure, Martinez's chances of reaching 400 total bases must be considered something of a longshot, though given the season he's had so far, it can't be ruled out entirely.

Still, as the division race tightens, Martinez's twin pursuit of history should offer two others races to monitor as the season approaches its final month.