Salvador Perez can do plenty, but it’s hard to avoid occupational hazards of being a catcher

Catcher always has been and always will be an inherently vulnerable position, and more than anything else that explains why Salvador Perez was out of the Royals lineup on Wednesday.

Short of encasing him in bubble-wrap or contouring him in Iron Man’s armor or simply not playing him, there is no way to ensure that he’ll get through any night unscathed.

He’s a catcher.

So Perez took a ball off his titanium mask on Tuesday night and was left dazed but not concussed and expected to return Thursday.

Even so, anyone who understands the precious role he plays might wonder how he could be better protected.

The only obvious answer, of course, is to sit him more often.

That’s not going to happen, evidently, unless it’s forced.

After Perez in 2014 caught in a Major League Baseball-record 161 games, including the playoffs, manager Ned Yost said he had to find a way to sit Perez more this year.

But Perez started 45 of the first 49 games before the Royals’ game with Cleveland on Wednesday at Kauffman Stadium.

So … that’s out.

As for his gear, the Royals have invested abundant time and energy on fortifying Perez’s equipment properly for more than a year.

And there is a lot that goes into this thinking, including conflicting advantages and disadvantages to equipment in terms of safety and comfort and to what degree Perez can still be his seamless self in cumbersome gear.

“Kind of a coin-toss, to be honest with you,” said Royals’ instructor Jason Kendall, a former catcher.

The clunky older mask, for instance, actually has more padding … but is heavy to the point of straining the neck, said bench coach Don Wakamatsu, also a former catcher.

As for the hockey-style mask, Wakamatsu said, “the jury’s still out” — in part because of the sensation of a “garbage-can echoing from a foul ball” off it.

The regular titanium, he added, is “really, really light and really, really strong — but there’s no give in it and there’s no absorption in it.”

So for all the advances, nothing necessarily offers a solution that is both ironclad safe and non-inhibiting.

Same as it ever was.

The occupational hazards explain why anyone crazy enough to play the position wears what are known as the “tools of ignorance” and why many seem to come into playing it either by happenstance or necessity.

Before he became a two-time All-Star who is arguably the Royals’ most indispensable player, Perez was a 14-year-old inauspiciously auditioning as a third baseman for Royals’ scout Orlando Estevez.

Estevez suggested he throw a couple balls from behind home plate, and everything changed.

In the case of Wakamatsu, 52, he simply threw too hard for anyone to catch him in Little League, so, shazam, he was a catcher.

For Kendall, 40, it took a combination of his father having been a big-league catcher and circumstances his sophomore year of high school.

“I was playing second base, and our varsity catcher got in a fight,” he said. “He got suspended, and our backup catcher wasn’t throwing anybody out, so they put me out there in the second inning.

“And I never left it.”

Yost, 59, became a catcher when his Little League coach asked if anyone ever had caught before.

He raised his hand because, after all, he was the one who would catch when they played baseball in his cul de sac and, well, “I was willing to do it.”

A lot has changed since the three elders were behind the plate. Equipment options have expanded dramatically; rules have been implemented to reduce collisions.

“Back then, we didn’t even wear helmets; we just put on the catcher mask over your hat. We didn’t have any of that throat protector stuff,” said Yost, who noted that collisions were such a part of the game that he tended to take an offensive attitude toward them. “If you tried to barrel into me, I’d make you pay; I mean, I wouldn’t stand there; I’d take two steps up and meet you halfway.”

Chances are Perez won’t become the subject of a photo essay that Yost was when he was catching for Milwaukee in 1982 and got plowed by the New York Yankees’ Bobby Murcer a split second before he caught the ball.

“He knocked me four rows back,” said Yost, who recalled seeing a three-picture sequence of the collision in the New York Post, the middle of which depicted him “flying back, my glove’s off, my mask is still on my face” but pulled away from it.

But some things haven’t and won’t change:

The catcher is susceptible to getting hurt from an infinite array of means and angles, from sudden bat backlashes to the grinding wear-and-tear of squatting and throwing to the bruising from blocking balls and shock of ever-looming foul tips.

That’s why the position attracts a different sort of temperament.

“Do they have a will to do that? Do they have a want to do that?” Wakamatsu said. “Guys that want to catch tend to understand the responsibilities back there and like the challenges and all of the above, whether it’s the leadership part of it or the toughness part of it or the getting dirty part of it.”

A rare abundance of the qualities it takes to play the position well is why it’s so hard for Yost to do the one thing that could keep Perez out of jeopardy: not play him as often.

“I’ve never seen a guy behind the plate be so smooth with everything he does,” said Kendall, noting Perez’s fluidity and adding, “He’s the closest to automatic there is in the game.”

But just as automatically prone to absorbing the risks of the position.

He’s a catcher, after all.

This story was originally published June 3, 2015 at 9:38 PM with the headline "Salvador Perez can do plenty, but it’s hard to avoid occupational hazards of being a catcher."