Here’s why Kansas City Royals star Sal Perez’s year was one of best in MLB history
Kansas City Royals third base coach Vance Wilson caught for eight years in the majors and 15 years in professional baseball. He played with and against some of the best catchers in Major League Baseball’s history, the guys viewed as prototypes for their era, legends of the position, Hall of Famers.
He’s seen first-hand the best the game has had to offer at that position for the better part of the last 30 years, and he never saw anything like what he witnessed this season from Royals All-Star catcher Salvador Perez.
In the majors, Wilson backed up Hall of Famers Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez and Mike Piazza. Wilson caught a career-high 96 games in the majors in 2003 in the same division as Javy Lopez the season Lopez hit 43 homers. Wilson came up in the Mets organization that produced Todd Hundley and played most of his major-league career parallel to the New York Yankees’ longtime catcher and five-time Silver Slugger winner Jorge Posada.
“That’s the first thing — what it takes just to play every single day, defensively,” Wilson said. “Then you look at the seasons they had. And I will say one thing. I’m not even speculating or nothing, but Salvy is playing in a time when, for the most part, we’ve pushed performance enhancing drugs out. He gets tested just as all players do at times.
“For him to do what he’s doing in our ballpark, it’s the greatest offensive season of a catcher of all time. I really think that.”
Having witnessed some of the best offensive catchers of the modern era, Wilson noticed several commonalities about those individual seasons and Perez’s year as it unfolded.
First and foremost, staying in the lineup everyday.
Second, the ability to hit home runs to all fields jumped out at Wilson in watching the daily exploits of Piazza just as it did this season with Perez.
Then, of course, there’s just the raw power. Wilson shook his head in awe while recalling Perez having hit 46 or 47 “no doubters” of his franchise-record-tying 48 home runs this season.
“It’s not a whole lot of hook-around-the-foul-pole home runs,” Wilson said. “They keep the ball fair, which means they’re staying through the zone, they’re managing the speed of the pitches. I think that’s the biggest thing that he has in common with those guys. The one thing he has more so, in my opinion, is he has more power than any of those guys.”
The challenge of KC
Perez’s season wasn’t simply remarkable from the standpoint of a catcher, but he had one of the most productive seasons of any player in the majors this year.
Perez’s 48 home runs tied Toronto first baseman Vladimir Guerrero for the major-league lead. It also tied the Royals single-season record set by Jorge Soler in 2019.
Perez’s 121 runs batted in led the majors and were four more than the Chicago White Sox first baseman Jose Abreu, who had the next highest total.
“I don’t want to take away from what Soler did at all because it was an incredible year that he had,” Royals second baseman Whit Merrifield said. “It’s hard to understand what catching 130 games in Kansas City — in the heat that we have and the weather that we get and the humidity that we have — what that does to someone’s body and to someone’s legs and what your legs mean to your swing.”
MLB Statcast ranks Kauffman Stadium as the second-hardest ballpark to hit home runs over a three-year period (2019-21), behind Oracle Park in San Francisco.
Perez became the second primary catcher (at least 75% of his games at catcher) to lead the majors in both home runs (48) and RBIs (121), the other having been Hall of Famer Johnny Bench in 1970 and 1972.
Perez also tied the record for the most games played in a season by a primary catcher. He played 161 games and caught 124 (MLB-best 120 starts). He also threw out 44% of attempted base stealers this season, the highest percentage of any catcher with at least 375 innings caught.
A 6-foot-3, 255-pound 10-year MLB veteran, Perez squatted behind the plate for 1,003 2/3 innings, which was the fourth-most of any catcher in the majors this season.
Merrifield, who has the longest active streak of consecutive games played in the majors (469), marveled at the way Perez endured that grind of catching and still hit the ball hard so consistently. Perez recorded the second-highest hard-hit rate in the majors.
“People don’t do that, you just don’t do that,” Merrifield said. “Soler DHed for the most part when he was here, and I’m sure his legs were a lot fresher than Salvy’s. So it’s apples to oranges, and it’s just amazing to watch.”
Freakish ability
Royals manager Mike Matheny caught for 12 seasons in the majors and won four Gold Gloves along the way. He insists that he became a better hitter as he got older, but he’ll also point out that he had a lot of room for improvement offensively.
Matheny also knows that science will tell you that the peak age for a ballplayer is supposedly around 27.
So what’s the word to describe Perez at 31 seemingly finding his stride as a hitter?
“Freakish,” Matheny said.
“Guys like Salvy are making up with intelligence and training more specifically, taking advantage of all of the scientific improvements that we’ve had — all of that combined makes sense to why he is now becoming the kind of hitter that he is,” Matheny added. “I don’t see that going anywhere anytime soon.”
Bench’s long-standing record of 45 home runs by a primary catcher came in 1970, his third full season in the majors at the age of 22.
By the end of his history-making season, Bench had started 466 games behind the plate and caught 3,941 innings. He started 1,161 more games as a catcher after his 45-homer season, and reached 40 homers once more in 1972.
Perez eclipses Bench’s prodigious power season at the age of 31 in the same season he reached 10 years of major-league service time and less than a week after he made his 1,000th career start behind the plate. He’s caught 8,703 2/3 innings in his major-league career.
“I do think he’s in a good place right now despite the wear and tear or however you want to label as far as how many games he has caught,” Matheny said. “His body just seems to really respond well to the demands of the game. I think he needs to think he needs to thank his mama. I think he needs to get on his knees a lot and be grateful because there’s a lot of genetics and also a lot of hard work, combined, for him to be as large of a man as he is to be able to do what he has done.”
Rededicated after surgery
Wilson, now who finished his 11th season in the Royals organization, spent more than half that time on the player development side as a manager in the farm system.
“I think the biggest thing you learn as a coach, especially when you’re fortunate enough to come up through the minor leagues, everyone’s clock is different,” Wilson said. “Everyone’s maturity is different. Obviously, Johnny Bench is a generational player as is Salvy. It has just came at different times.
“One, Salvy was so hyped on his defense coming in. Then he transferred from not really a power hitter to all of a sudden he’s got some power. That just takes time, and at the same time is when the transition of velocity and pitching up [became prevalent]. It’s a testament to Salvy that he has learned to do what he’s doing at a really tough time and a tough transition in the game with the way pitching has gone.”
Perez posted identical career-high performances in back-to-back seasons in 2017 and 2018, having hit 27 homers and collected 80 RBIs in each season.
Those were All-Star seasons with upper-tier offensive production, particularly for a catcher.
Then everything came to a screeching halt with Tommy John surgery stopping his 2019 season before it started.
By the time the pandemic-shortened 2020 season started, Perez hadn’t played a regular-season game in nearly two years (Sept. 30, 2018 to July 24, 2020).
Last season, Perez earned his third Silver Slugger award as well as MLB Comeback Player of the Year honors. In 37 games, he hit 11 home runs, 12 doubles, drove in 32 runs and posted a .333 batting average with a .986 OPS.
But it took a full season for Perez to truly show he’d taken his game to a new level.
“Yeah, I saw a little bit of a special year coming in the fact that — not so much the numbers — when you take the game away from somebody that loves like Salvy did with the year of Tommy John, you’re going to see somebody really come back alive and with a much higher appreciation for the game,” Wilson said. “I think when they do that and you’re talented like Salvy, you’re actually going to see their ceiling rise.”
Behind the scenes, it was clear that the way Perez approached his preparation and the renewed desire would yield results.
His .859 OPS was his best for a full-length season, as was his .544 slugging percentage (10th-best in MLB).
A notorious free swinger, Perez’s .316 on-base percentage was his highest for a 162-game season since 2013, as was his .273 batting average. He drew a career-high 28 walks.
“I would never have guessed that he could take it to this level, but I think we all knew as a staff he was going to be a special hitter,” Wilson said.
This story was originally published October 5, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
