Is it time to perform a drastic update on the list of Atlanta’s more dynamic athletes?
Can we, in good conscience, review the roster of those who produce the offensive highlight and make the scoreboard glow, then concede that it just may be a soccer player who is leading them all right now?
Where the Falcons’ Julio Jones avoided the end zone rather shockingly last season (three scoring catches), Josef Martinez has scored 23 goals in only 23 games in his Atlanta United career. Four in three games this season.
Goals are supposed to be a lot more difficult to come by than that. In fact, I have based a lifetime of resistance to soccer on the very idea that nobody ever scores. Apparently, they have removed the moat from around the net.
Here’s a guy in Martinez who’s on pace to average a goal per game. Over a 34-game MLS season that would be – if my math is correct – 34 goals. The league record is 27, held by three players.
Is such a scoring frenzy sustainable?
Asked that, Martinez first knocks on the wooden table before him.
And then said, through an interpreter, “Only God knows, but forwards have streaks sometimes. You can go 50 games without scoring, then you score one, and it seems like everything is going in.”
As we await to see what direction this Braves season points, let’s ponder the possibility of a soccer player spending a summer scoring more goals than Freddie Freeman hits home runs. It’s conceivable. Freeman’s career high is 34, set in 2016. Whatever his total this season, Freeman has nearly five times the number of games to do his thing.
Coming from a baseball-mad country, Venezuela, Martinez has the highest respect for hitting a round ball with round bat. He is a fixture at Braves games and a friend to center fielder and fellow Venezuelan Ender Inciarte. He’s even scheduled to throw out the first pitch at one coming game, after receiving special dispensation to use his hands.
This much he knows: Martinez hit a few home runs in his school-day games growing up and, personally, scoring a goal is better.
“There is no comparison because baseball is not my sport. Soccer is my sport,” he said.
Martinez also has done more with the 3 than any Hawk. That’s as in three goals in a game, the hat trick. In his brief time in MLS, Martinez already has four of those. The latest came in Atlanta United’s last game, against Vancouver. One more, he’ll already tie the league record for career three-goal games.
And, for the record, Martinez is more committed to the two-tone hair style than Hawks guard Dennis Schroder. His gold dome stretches from frontal region to crown and stands out on any soccer pitch like a full moon at midnight.
“I have my own style, and I always try to do something different than other people,” he said. “I don’t want to do what anyone else is doing. I want to do my own thing.”
It is, of course, an apples-to-oranges comparison between what Martinez and these others do on offense. Still, the company he is keeping is rather remarkable given that we are dealing with a 24-year-old who is optimistically listed at 5-foot-7, 154 pounds.
Goes to show there is no one standard package for scoring might.
Martinez is small but built on a sturdy foundation of cypress trunk legs. He is a player Atlanta United counts upon when it is time to rise up and get a head above the crowd.
So, coming at this whole comparative theme from a purely ugly American perspective, that leaves one question for the soccer player: Can he dunk?
“I don’t know if I could. I’d like to try it someday,” Martinez said.
You want your most dynamic of athletes to be game and confident.
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