Hot & cold of Kansas City Royals’ Salvy Perez. And he wants to play ‘til he’s HOW old?!
There are literal warnings against Salvador Perez’s daily routine. This is not some sportswriter trick to make an athlete appear tough or daring. This is me copying directly from the National Center for Cold Water Safety website about what you should expect in water between 50 and 60 degrees:
Total loss of breathing control. Maximum intensity cold shock. Unable to control gasping and hyperventilation.
Seriously. That’s what it says. They even put the header in red letters, calling it “Very Dangerous/Immediately Life-threatening.”
The words are clear: Do not do this, you lunatic.
Perez, the Royals catcher, does this every day. Many times. Many, many times.
“Not too many guys like to do that,” Perez said, which, well … yeah. Story checks out.
Perez does this before every game. He gets in the 50-degree cold tub, sits for five minutes (most experts in this field recommend no more than 1) and then goes to the 106-degree hot tub for another five minutes. He repeats the process two or three times.
Then, after the game, he does it again.
Perez has done this routine hundreds of times, perhaps into the thousands, even in the offseason. The shock and discomfort are mostly gone, but his teeth still rattle.
He doesn’t do this for a cool story. The process is called contrast bath. The idea is to promote circulation, decrease swelling and inflammation, alleviate pain and improve mobility. Studies suggest the process is effective in treating and preventing injuries, relieving soreness, and improving mobility.
All good things for catchers, particularly catchers who by all accounts would rather rip their toenails out slowly, with rusted tweezers, than take a day off.
Perez draws a direct connection. The same thing that makes his teeth rattle also allowed him to play more than 1,000 games mostly at catcher before he turned 31.
“Seriously, I feel like my body is in the best shape ever,” he said.
Athletes say that so much it’s become a cliche stacked upon a cliche — even joking about “the best shape of my life” is tired.
But with this guy? Maybe it’s true.
His elbow gave out in spring training before the 2019 season. Particularly with hindsight, this was a critical moment in his career.
The year before, then-manager Ned Yost had said something notable on many levels. Yost, you remember, was something like a Royals hype man. His job was to believe, to promote, to never doubt.
And Perez, you know, is something like a perpetual child on his birthday. Always pumped, always convinced that the best things in life are on the way.
And Yost had become convinced that Perez was turning sad. That the Royals’ losing — first his friends and stars like Lorenzo Cain and Eric Hosmer left in free agency after 2017, and then the Royals lost 104 games in 2018 — had begun to wear on Perez’s stubborn happiness.
Then something even worse happened: Perez’s elbow blew up, and he missed the entire 2019 season.
He was at the stadium often rehabbing, but the time away from the dugout and games and his teammates was always going to push him one way or the other. He was going to continue to drift away from that joy that defined his 20s and so many of the Royals’ best moments, or he was going to recapture it.
His elbow healed, and even with the small sample warnings of the shortened 2020 season he had the best offensive season of his career at age 30: .333/.353/.633. Each of those numbers represent a career best.
Entering Friday’s game, he was hitting .275/.307/.478. If he maintained that pace, it would mean his highest full-season adjusted OPS seasons would come in his 30s.
This is significant. The Royals began internal discussions about Perez moving away from being a full-time catcher years ago. The discussions are more precautionary; a move has never been imminent.
But he’s 6-foot-3 and 250 pounds and men his size typically don’t play catcher into their 30s. Doubt about his longevity at the position and ability to produce as he ages is why most around baseball believed the Royals overpaid on his four-year, $82 million contract extension.
Yet here he is, 31 years old, and at the moment his best two offensive seasons are his two most recent.
How does this work? A guy many thought would age horribly is having his best seasons in his 30s?
“It’s a great question,” Perez said. “I’m super aggressive. Everybody knows I like to swing. I don’t have a lot of walks. So I try to be patient a little more … I’m still aggressive. They’re not going to take that from me. But in some specific counts, where we know (through data) that it’s 80 percent, 85 percent, 87 percent ball, I don’t have to swing. Things like that.”
Be honest: did you laugh? It’s OK if you did. But understand that Perez is not claiming to be Kevin Youkilis all of a sudden. He’s never taken more than 22 walks in a season.
But what he’s saying checks out — Perez’s pitches per plate appearance have increased every year since 2015. He’s still below league average in that measurement, but a six-year trend is hard to deny. That means something.
At least some of what it means is that if this is real — if Perez feels as good as says, and if he continues to produce like he has in his 30s — then his career jumps from franchise icon to something even bigger.
Perez wants to be a Hall of Famer. He’s open about this. His case needs work, and this is a quick and superficial way to look at it but at the same age he has slightly better offensive numbers, one fewer Gold Glove and one fewer World Series ring than Yadier Molina. Molina also had two top 4 MVP finishes; Perez has zero.
But if his case needs work, Perez believes he has more work in him.
“The way that I feel?” he said. “I think I’m going to play catcher until I’m 45.”
Forty-five! Perez may or may not know this, and he probably wouldn’t care either way, but Carlton Fisk is the only big-leaguer to catch even one inning in an age-45 season since 1934.
And that’s nothing. Later in the conversation Perez said he might catch until 50, or even 60. He was joking. We think.
Either way, that’s a lot of cold baths.
This story was originally published May 28, 2021 at 5:00 AM.