J.D. Martinez comes across as a grown-up fan boy, and that might turn out to be a very good thing for the Red Sox.

Did you catch the new Sox slugger’s introductory press conference Monday morning? Though he read from the standard cue cards about how cool it will be to play for the Red Sox – historic franchise, winning is No. 1, chance to play on a championship team, etc. – he described the Boston Baseball Experience in a way that suggests he really does get it.

“Football has Monday night,” he said. “They say Fenway is like ‘Monday Night Football’ every night.”

We’ve heard other big-time acquisitions – Adrian Gonzalez, Edgar Renteria and Carl Crawford come to mind – talk about how excited they were to join the Red Sox. And then they burned their hands the first time they turned the doorknob to the clubhouse. But here’s the latest new guy, likening Fenway to “Monday Night Football” and doing so in a positive way.

Listening to him drop the MNF reference brings renewed interest in the photo that was making the rounds last week of a 19-year-old J.D. Martinez visiting Fenway as a for-real fan boy – and being decked out in a Red Sox shirt.

He was talking about it Monday, how he traveled north from Miami to visit his sister, who was earning her doctorate in dentistry at Boston University, and how she knew the brother of former Sox third baseman Mike Lowell. So the 19-year-old kid visited Fenway, the tickets left at the window by Lowell.

He didn’t merely go in. With the Red Sox shirt, he went all in.

We hear many stories about big leaguers who were always so busy playing baseball growing up that they never had time to embrace baseball. There are many exceptions, such as Pedro Martinez, who could recite the game’s history off the top of his head, and former Sox second baseman Mark Loretta, who poured through a list of available uniform numbers when he joined the team in 2006 and jumped on No. 3 for no other reason than because it was once worn by Hall of Famer Jimmie Foxx.

And then there was the time a San Francisco Chronicle photographer went out to Candlestick Park at a time when it looked like the Giants might be moving to Tampa and caught a great image of a dejected 5-year-old fan.

The dejected 5-year-old fan now is 31-year-old Giants shortstop Brandon Crawford, a three-time Gold Glove winner and member of two World Series-winning teams.

Pedro Martinez, Mark Loretta and Brandon Crawford were fan boys. J.D. Martinez was a fan boy.

Given the history of new players parachuting into Fenway and landing on the cement outside the ballpark, perhaps it won’t make any difference. Maybe Martinez will be as uncomfortable as Crawford was. Maybe he’ll complain about all the Sunday night games, as Gonzalez did.

As for the “Monday Night Football” line, it should be noted Martinez apparently isn’t a huge grid fan, telling reporters, “I’m not crazy about it.”

So what? The reference reveals Martinez as a guy who gets it. And besides, he had the good sense Monday to pay a public relations courtesy call to the Patriots’ Tom Brady.

“I am a Tom Brady fan,” he said. “To me, he’s probably the greatest football player ever. The championships and what he does with his team is unbelievable.”

Martinez’s diplomatic skills already are coming in handy, as when he had to address a comment his former Detroit Tigers teammate David Price made to USA Today last week.

“I told J.D. he will love the guys here in this clubhouse, but also told him he’ll get booed,” Price said to USA Today’s Bob Nightengale. “He’s a quiet, soft-spoken guy, but he’ll handle it. Besides, everyone gets booed. I heard Big Papi get booed many times in Fenway.”

Martinez, appearing on WEEI after the press conference, said, “That’s funny, because he never said that to me, honestly.”

Maybe Price did say it. Maybe he didn’t but was just shooting his mouth off. Doesn’t make any difference. What’s important here is that Martinez wants no part of it. He just wants to . . . wait for it, wait for it . . . avoid the negativity.

At the end of the day, all big league athletes are businessmen. They are mercenaries, hired muscle, soldiers of fortune. Given the money involved – a possible $110 million in Martinez’s five-year deal – the players would be foolish not to take such a hard, businesslike approach to these negotiations.

But it can’t hurt to bring a little of the old fan boy to the park every day.

It might help Martinez not only survive Fenway, but maybe even have a little fun along the way.

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