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Florida shortstop Richie Martin raked in the Cape Cod league last summer, hitting .364/.432/.469 for Bourne, finishing second in the league in average, fifth in OBP and eighth in slugging. He's a true shortstop and is very likely to stay at the position in the long run, but despite that performance last summer in the nation's best wood-bat collegiate league, I think there are real questions about his hit tool in the long term. Martin's swing is very short and direct, with no load, just a slight trigger before he moves his hands forward, making a lot of contact without much loft. He does have some hip rotation to drive the ball with his lower half, but lacking any sort of load cuts off the potentially average or fringe-average power he might have. On Tuesday night at Central Florida, he looked extremely uncomfortable against anything thrown on the inner third or inside, both in approach and in his body language, flinching even at some pitches thrown for inside strikes.
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