Royals’ Salvador Perez is on pace for an MLB record. He’d rather not break this one

Three hours before first pitch, Royals catcher Salvador Perez grabs a couple of his wooden bats and carries them to the hitting cage behind the Kauffman Stadium home dugout. Over the ensuing half hour, Perez and several teammates cycle through their pregame routines, taking swings at live pitching.

Except Perez’s batting practice regimen comes with a quirk. After hitting waist-high pitches down the middle of the plate, Perez asks his coaches to throw him pitches outside the strike zone.

Off the plate. Above the hands. And most importantly, pitches just a foot off the ground.

“I have to (practice) hitting it because I don’t take that pitch,” Perez said. “So I gotta learn how to hit it. If you’re not going to take it, at least learn how to hit the low pitch.”

This year’s stats show that Perez has been swinging at a lot of those “bad balls” — more of them, in fact, than any other player in recorded history.

Perez, thus far, has swung at 50.2 percent of pitches thrown to him that are outside the strike zone. It’s a career high ... and it’s much more than that. Baseball Info Solutions, which has compiled plate-discipline data since 2002, has never tracked a player who has swung at more than 49 percent of pitches outside the strike zone.

Perez doesn’t study the numbers, but he has coaches who do. He’s aware he does the bulk of his damage against strikes, and the stats bear that out. And even though he practices hitting balls outside the zone — which he says he does nearly every day — the intent is still to make the pitcher deliver more hittable pitches.

“I try a lot. Every time I take a ball down, I’m happy,” Perez said. “It’s hard for me. I’m aggressive. I don’t think I’m the only guy. There’s a lot of people who are aggressive.”

He mimicked his batting practice routine off one of them. Perez learned that, earlier in his career, Rangers third baseman Adrian Beltre used to request fastballs high in the strike zone — a pitch he struggled to take yet often did little damage against.

It seems to have worked for Beltre — over the past three seasons, he ranks fifth in average and ninth in slugging percentage (out of 138 players who have received 100 high pitches) on those offerings above the strike zone, according to Statcast.

“It’s hard to see the top of the strike zone, you know, a high fastball, but he always chased that pitch,” Perez said. “So he learned how to hit it.”

For Perez, the most enticing pitch resides below the strike zone — the location where sliders and changeups often fall. The pregame routine is adjusted accordingly.

Perez bought a low hitting tee that sits about a foot off the ground, he says. Nearly every day, he takes hacks off it.

But make no mistake — the plan isn’t to swing at those pitches in an actual game. “If I take it, great,” he says. The instinctual aggression just often gets the better of him, and it’s been an especially a difficult habit to break.

There have been 2,554 qualified hitters over the past 17 MLB seasons. None of those players, in a single season, has shown more impatience on pitches outside the zone than Perez in 2018.

And yet he still reached the 20-home run plateau with a pair of blasts Wednesday, only the fifth Royals player to accomplish that feat in four straight seasons. The second pitch was absent the strike zone.

But even as some of the biggest hits of his career have come on seemingly bad pitches to hit, he’s typically best served shying away from them.

According to Statcast, his batting average (.152) on non-strikes is below league average, while his slugging percentage (.258) is decent for that split but still not good compared to his in-zone numbers. On pitches inside the zone, Perez has a .294 average and .566 slugging percentage.

“Some guys work in the cage, when we’re going through different stuff, guys will work on (pitches) in the strike zone,” Royals manager Ned Yost said. “Salvy will work on balls in the strike zone and balls out of the strike zone because he is such a good bad-ball hitter. He’s won major games with us with pitches that aren’t even close to being strikes. He’s hit home runs on pitches that aren’t even close to being strikes.”

The most famous hit of Perez’s career — and one of the most memorable in recent Royals history — came off such a pitch. Perez lunged to connect with a pitch and sent it down the third-base line, the walk-off winner in the 2014 AL Wild Card Game.

But this year’s numbers would suggest that Perez is more productive when he doesn’t turn that into a habit, as his plate discipline appears to be a significant indicator of his output. When he is able to take pitches, his on base plus slugging percentage (OPS) quickly rises. When he chases, the OPS drops.

He’s been more selective lately. The chase rate is down to 45 percent since the all-star break, and perhaps not coincidentally, he’s posted a .916 OPS over that time — the best mark on the team among hitters with at least 20 plate appearances.

“I know that I need to take the pitch if it’s not there,” Perez said. “But if I don’t take it, at least try to hit it good.”