Mellinger Minutes: Celebrating Salvy, Kansas City Chiefs predictions + keeping secrets
What Salvador Perez is doing is not normal. It is not logical. It is not to be taken for granted.
His last 10 games: eight home runs and 16 RBIs.
His last 24 games: 12 home runs, 28 RBIs, 1.091 OPS.
His last 81 games: 29 home runs, 66 RBIs, .907 OPS.
His last 166 games, dating back to last season: .290/.324/.565 with 49 home runs and 126 RBIs.
July and August have been the least productive months of Perez’s career — but this July and August he’s been better than ever.
From the moment he signed that first extension in spring training in 2012, baseball people have expected Perez to require a position switch and his production to dip in his 30s — but the best two seasons of his career have been the two seasons in his 30s.
He is hitting the ball hard more often and harder than ever before. He’s seeing more pitches than ever before.
For a decade, American League pitchers knew the best way to get him out. They respected his power and knew a mistake would often be hit over the fence. The plan would be to feed him breaking balls, especially outside the zone, and either strike him out or induce soft contact.
Perez’s superior hand-eye coordination turned enough of those mistakes into highlights to build a reputation as one of the game’s better players, but using FanGraphs’ measurements he was a combined 40.6 runs below average on sliders and curveballs.
This season, he is 8.1 runs above average on those pitches. Only seven American League batters have been better against sliders.
Perez has credited hitting coach Terry Bradshaw for providing data and video that have improved his approach. He’s still the sport’s most aggressive hitter — his overall swing percentage and swing percentage on pitches outside the zone are the highest in baseball — but he’s making better contact than ever on those swings.
That would align with his explanation about having better preparation. Pitchers are still giving him a lot of breaking balls and leaving them outside the zone, but if he’s expecting them he can either lay off or barrel them more often.
This is interesting: Of Perez’s eight home runs in these last 10 games, only one has come on a ball outside the zone, using MLB.com’s pitch tracking. He’s one of the game’s best bad-ball hitters, but at the moment he’s just not missing on a lot of balls in the zone.
There has been a rush to put Perez’s career in context. Here and on the podcast we’ve answered different forms of the Will Salvy Make The Hall of Fame question a few times*. It’s been popular to say he’s the second-best player in franchise history**.
* The answer is that he has a ways to go, but the path is much clearer than it appeared two years ago.
** He may get there, but it’s easy to lose track of how good Amos Otis and Frank White and others were. Right now, he’s ninth in Royals history in Baseball Reference’s version of WAR, behind George Brett, Otis, Willie Wilson, White and Alex Gordon among position players.
We can do that here, and have, and will continue doing it. That’s part of the fun of sports.
But at least at the moment, what feels more fun is simply enjoying the show. Perez has never done this before. Few have. We could be watching a Hall of Fame career from beginning to end, all in Kansas City, and you have to be at or nearing retirement age to have had that experience before.
This has been a weird Royals season. They were the best team in baseball, and then one of the worst. Their young pitchers looked overmatched and now have often been doing the overmatching. They are 21-16 since July 20 and exactly .500 since June 29.
The losing streaks ruined this team’s chances of competing for the playoffs and they’ve also overshadowed some real progress that’s been made the last few months. We’ll talk about all of that and more below, but here at the top, it’s worth a moment to go deep on one of the best players in Royals history operating at the height of his powers.
This week’s eating recommendation is the brisket from Harp Barbecue, and the reading recommendation is Seth Wickersham on Matthew Stafford’s strange place: 12 years into an NFL career and nobody knows how good he is.
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It’s not going to happen. This is not a hot take. It’s just logic.
There will be blown coverages and an inconsistent pass rush. There will be rough moments from the offensive line and teams that blanket Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce. There could even be — maybe! — an off day by the quarterback.
The interesting part to me isn’t this weird chase of a record that would require luck and more. The interesting part to me is where it came from.
This was Patrick Mahomes making a deliberate choice, using a media outlet and the reaction he knew it would create to fix a relatively small problem he detected in 2020.
Any criticisms of a 14-1 season* that ended in the Super Bowl are by definition high-level criticisms, but that’s where we are.
* The varsity only lost one game, the loss to the Raiders that was avenged six weeks later.
Mahomes has talked about detecting a lack of urgency last season. He hasn’t put it in those words, but that’s the gist. He’s talked about a feeling of just getting through each week and game, with a high-level confidence that they were getting to the Super Bowl either way.
The point he’s making is that each day is a chance to get better, and that those chances add up by the end of the season. That may or may not have mattered last season with all the injuries on the offensive line.
But Mahomes isn’t taking that chance, and putting 20-0 out there is a challenge to his teammates. It’s not about literally winning every game on the scoreboard as much as it’s about winning every practice and week — get better now so you’ll be at your best in January and February.
This is a little bit of the issue we’ve talked about here and on the podcast before — how do you stay hungry when you’ve been eating steak?
How do you chase the second championship with as much or more urgency than you used to win the first?
The answer is you can’t, but you can make some subtle changes in personnel and approach to take advantage of what you have.
That’s what Mahomes is doing here. It’s not about going 17-0 in the regular season. It’s about 3-0 in the playoffs.
I’m assuming this is a reference to the NFL Top 100 segment on Mahomes, who was put in the top spot for the first time.
Here’s the entire video, with the relevant part here starting at 2:40:
We do not need to wait. He was clearly mocking the list last year, same as he was mocking the Bears picking Mitchell Trubisky the season before. We all understand this. The only thing I don’t understand is why he won’t admit it.
There’s no mystery here, and not that we need it, but people close to him will admit as much privately.
But here’s a thing that’s true:
The worst season of Patrick Mahomes’ career was either the time he won MVP, the time he won the Super Bowl and Super Bowl MVP or the time he led the league in yards per game and interception rate and was given the top spot in the NFL’s rankings.
He’s ridiculous.
I believe the offensive line will have some rough moments, particularly early in the season.
Would that qualify as a disappointment?
The line has been terrific in the preseason, keeping Mahomes clean, opening big holes in the run game, and avoiding penalties. I do think the line — depending on health — has a top 5-ish ceiling, but I keep thinking about the 2019 defense.
That unit was completely remade and had some ugly moments early. Took until November for them to really hit the mark, starting with the win over the Chargers in Mexico City. I’m expecting a free run at Mahomes and some missed stunts that will be blamed on miscommunication.
Orlando Brown may not end up as the plug-and-play left tackle that a lot of people assume he’ll be. He’s more than talented enough, and I do think he’ll be a good player there for a long time. But even with his size and athleticism, the jump from blocking for the Ravens and Lamar Jackson is far enough from the Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes that we could see a prolonged adjustment period.
Also: I do not believe Jody Fortson will be inducted to the Hall of Fame.
We talked about this some on the Border Patrol, but I believe it’s a given that we’ll see a surprise cut. This is just math. The Chiefs have more than 53 players who are good enough to be on a 53-man roster.
Here’s an example: If the Chiefs keep four tight ends, it probably means they can only have five receivers, which would probably mean Daurice Fountain is cut.
Kyle Long will presumably begin the season on the PUP list, which could mean the Chiefs keep nine offensive linemen, and if that happens they’re probably cutting Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, Nick Allegretti or Austin Blythe.
Fifth-round pick Cornell Powell is probably on the wrong side of the bubble. I’ve been really impressed with Tim Ward — both in games and the practices I saw — but defensive line is perhaps the team’s deepest position group.
Andy Reid’s first team in Kansas City included seven players taken from other rosters after final cuts. That team had a lot of talent at the top but was terribly thin in the middle and bottom.
The Chiefs now have even more talent at the top, but the front office — first with John Dorsey’s leadership, and now with Brett Veach’s — has improved the depth enough that three or four cuts could end up on some other team’s 53.
It’s a remarkable transformation.
Isn’t it weird that after all we’ve seen, the Royals are likely to end up exactly like a lot of us expected?
Depending on where you shopped, their over-under number was 73 1/2. They are currently 59-71, a win percentage that puts them on pace for 73.523 victories.
They have 32 games left and have won 16 of their last 32. If they keep that pace they’d finish with 75 wins, which would be a fair indication of where this team is — improving, but with significant space to go.
The “learn how to win” thing is easy and fun to mock, and I salute you for a solid job of it here. But it’s shorthand for something real, and we can see examples all over the roster.
Daniel Lynch is the most obvious. He was jaw-droppingly bad after his May promotion, lasting just eight innings over three starts with a 15.75 ERA and an opponent’s slash line that looks like a typo: .474/.511/.763.
He was demoted, made 12 starts for Omaha, and has since been magnificent: 40 1/3 innings across seven starts with a 2.23 ERA and an opponent’s slash line of .242/.322/.346.
He’s not perfect — the Royals would like to see fewer baserunners and more strikeouts — but he looks confident in ways that honestly did not seem possible this soon when he was demoted.
There are others. Nicky Lopez has in some ways saved the season from being worse. Jake Brentz has found success. Carlos Hernandez began the season as a long reliever, was twice moved to Omaha and is now one of the American League’s most intriguing young pitchers.
Edward Olivares, Kris Bubic, Brady Singer, Domingo Tapia and others have shown various levels of promise.
It’s also true that the results have been uneven. Hunter Dozier has struggled. Brad Keller is injured. The bullpen has been overworked. We could go on.
But overall, this team is in a good place. Or, at least, a better place than it was a year ago. The best minor-league talent isn’t even here yet, either.
The comparisons are far from perfect, but I keep thinking about 2012. The Royals were a trendy pick to contend that season after the mass graduation in 2011 of so many top prospects.
Then the season began, they were booed 16 minutes into the home opener, and they did not win a home game until May 3.
They were at least 10 games out of first place every day after July 15, so they were easy to dismiss, even as they finished that season 31-30. But the next season they had a winning record for the first time in a decade, won consecutive pennants and claimed a world championship.
This is not me telling you the Royals will win 86 games next year and be in the 2023 World Series.
I’m just saying that winning is hard and doesn’t come all at once. The Royals have to earn their praise. All I’m saying is that they’re in position to surprise a lot of people soon.
The easy thing is to say they should trade someone. You hear some fans say the same thing about the relative glut at shortstop.
I say that would be ill-advised unless you get surplus value because depth can become need pretty quickly in this business, and — assuming Melendez stays on this arc — the Royals can find ways to get both in the lineup.
Perez has DH’d 29 times, more than anyone on the roster*. By the end of this season he will have DH’d more than any other season in his career.
* Jorge Soler DH’d 44.
So, that’s one easy solution. The Royals have also experimented with him at first base, though they hope to have a long-term solution there with Nick Pratto.
Melendez is a very good athlete and there have been some internal conversations about him playing a corner outfield spot on days Perez is the catcher.
That’s enough potential options to believe in keeping both players, and expecting to win with both players.
Perez may very well be a freak of nature whose career comes without historical precedent. But the more likely scenario is that he’s in his 30s now, so it would be wise to do at least two things:
- Protect his body and energy as much as possible.
- Don’t be unprepared for a drop in production or a need to change positions.
Melendez presents the Royals with an enviable safety net, particularly if he can be an average or above-average defender at another position.
I haven’t heard that. I also haven’t asked that question, but I’d be surprised if anything was in the works.
The Royals have traditionally been aggressive about extending their homegrown players. That’s common around baseball, and it’s smart business.
But deals before a player’s big-league debut are rare. The Royals have never done one. The quickest extension they did was with Perez after he’d played just 39 games in the big leagues.
My understanding is that Perez initiated those negotiations. The extension was extremely team-friendly at the time and became so one-sided that the Royals essentially ripped up the end of it in signing a second extension that kicked in for the 2016 season.
The Royals are extremely conscious about these things. Not so much the money, but they like guys to get to, succeed in and enjoy the big leagues before going down this path. I’m paraphrasing here, but I’ve heard Dayton Moore say he likes to delay a player’s introduction to the business side of baseball as long as possible.
Players begin arbitration after two or three seasons. That’s usually a good mile-marker for when these deals can begin to be formed, using projections about future earnings and adding a year or two of club control in exchange for a player being set for life financially.
When the Royals signed Danny Duffy to that extension in 2017, Moore called it a success story no matter how Duffy performed. His point was that the contract was an acknowledgment of all that had gone well — Duffy’s own diligence and performance, as well as the club’s support.
On a much smaller scale, I would say that the fact you’re even thinking about this is a success story for the Royals’ player development.
You can make a sound argument either way — playoff baseball no matter the level is important, but so is getting big-league experience.
No two situations are identical, but if we’re just looking at this specific case I’d keep them in Omaha and let them chase a championship. There is no way to prove the point either way, but I do believe in the value of a core group winning and winning together. The example you bring up with Northwest Arkansas (and later Omaha) is a good one.
Bobby Witt Jr., Nick Pratto and MJ Melendez will be in the big leagues soon, and when they’re here they’ll play with some guys who are with them in Omaha now.
The experience of playing meaningful games now — and, we’re all adults here, you don’t need to point out that minor-league championships are not the same as big-league championships — can help later.
But as long as we’re here, I’d point out that the decision-making is different this year. The minor-league season stretches into September, with the first postseason since 2019 beginning on Sept. 21.
In years past, teams could do both. They could let their minor-leaguers finish the season and then still get some time in the big leagues. This is different now, and we haven’t even mentioned the fact that rosters will expand only to 28 this September instead of the traditional 40.
There simply aren’t the spots available that teams have had in the past.
So, in some ways, the Royals’ decisions are being made for them.
I’ve written a lot on Big 12 realignment. I’d rather not do more here because it makes me sad, but the short version is that the league is probably one more departure away from collapse. The collective best-case scenario is to invite the biggest programs currently not in a Power 5 conference — BYU, UCF, Houston, Cincinnati, etc.
That would at least avoid the worst outcome for the — I’m just going to say it — Big 8. But at that point the league is still probably closer to the AAC or Mountain West than it is the Big 10 or SEC.
They would need playoff expansion to get a spot most years, and it’s just hard to imagine a true national championship contender coming out of that league. I have nobody to blame but myself: I’m now sad.
Moving on, Mizzou and K-State need to be in bowl games to credibly claim success. Mizzou is in the tougher league but has a better roster and the schedule is relatively favorable.
There’s a lot of momentum in that program right now. Eli Drinkwitz is hitting all the right notes, especially in recruiting. They’ve made some interesting changes on defense and Connor Bazelak has shown a lot of reasons to be optimistic.
K-State has traditionally been tough with a returning quarterback, and if they can keep Skylar Thompson healthy they should be able to get above the Vegas win total of 5 1/2. Deuce Vaughn could be a star. They have a lot to replace, but if you believe in Chris Klieman you have to believe that he can get this team into a bowl game.
Kansas is more complicated. The roster is probably in better shape than public opinion for at least two reasons: Les Miles was building with high school recruits, and the general dysfunction he led prohibited anyone from reaching full potential.
Lance Leipold is, if nothing else, steady. That’s how he’s lived his life and led his career. KU had a rush of transfers both in and out, but if Leipold is happy with the talent he’s shown he can coach it up.
I don’t think KU is good enough that the Jayhawks can yet be judged on wins and losses. I think progress for them would be — and this sounds terrible, but it’s true — just looking like a Division I program. I’m talking about effort, organization and energy.
That’s step one. We can talk about the rest later.
It’s a terrible job, but it pays well — $16.5 million over five years for the challenge of his professional life, giving Leipold’s family long-term financial security along the way.
Leipold is more qualified for this job than anyone Kansas has hired since Mark Mangino. That’s a bit of a backhanded compliment because Turner Gill was overmatched from the beginning, Charlie Weis would have proven he was a bad hire even if cared, David Beaty was a position coach who brought a toy knife to a war and Les Miles was an aloof mis-manager of men.
Leipold is, at the very least, an adult.
When KU hired Beaty, I remember believing that he could very well be a good head coach but that KU’s problems were so enormous we might not ever know.
With Leipold, I’d go one step further: I believe he is a damn good head coach, but KU’s problems are so enormous we might not ever know.
The rough part for Leipold is that so much of this is out of his control. He could do everything right and still not win because an administration — and I’m thinking higher and broader than just new AD Travis Goff here — that let things get this bad continues with the same mistakes.
He could do everything right and still not win because the winds of realignment blow against KU.
He could do everything right and still not win because a program that has employed its previous four coaches for an average of less than three seasons loses patience.
What I’m saying is that your question bonds the competence of Leipold with the competence of KU football, but Leipold has a career’s worth of work that shows he can win, and KU has a history of the opposite.
If I’m honest, I didn’t know about this.
But I’m glad. Among the many bad consequences of how the business model of media outlets has changed over the last two decades is the evaporation of high school sports coverage.
When I started at The Star in 2000 I was one of seven full-time high school sportswriters. We have not had even one full-time high school sportswriter in years.
I’m not here to whine about that. Data showed newspapers across the country were spending far more covering high schools than they were getting back for it in terms of advertising or subscriptions. Business is business.
But I do think something real has been lost in the exchange. That was a great way for newspapers to connect with the communities they cover, but it was also a great way for high school students to be seen and celebrated. We need more of that in our world, not less.
So, I can sit here and tell you that I am usually skeptical of what we in the business sometimes call “state-run media.” I can tell you that reporters paid by the teams or leagues they cover are by definition biased. That doesn’t mean they can’t do good work. It just means they can’t do the work of independent outlets.
I’m going to tell you that I can bundle up all those concerns and light them on fire when it comes to high school sports.
I hope independent outlets continue to monitor high school sports and step in at the right moments, either to celebrate a significant accomplishment, tell a story that needs to be told or hold the powerful accountable.
But if it takes state activities associations hiring their own writers for games and athletes to be read about, then I’m not going to care as much about the lack of independent journalism. We had our chance.
I know some secrets, sure. Of course. But if I know something with value and don’t report it, I have a good reason.
This job is largely about relationships and trust, and there are two forms that I cherish and value above all else: relationships and trust with readers, and relationships and trust with sources.
If I burn one then the other will fall soon, and there are “secrets” I learn specifically because of trust. Dishonoring that trust would make me a bad person and a worse journalist.
Honoring that trust is how relationships with sources build, and relationships with sources building is how I can be valuable to readers. It’s how I can be worth your time and trust.
One of the best compliments I could ever get came from a source who felt burned by a journalist: “I guess I’m learning the only people who can be trusted with information are you and Terez.”
A few years ago, I inadvertently got involved in a mess. I’m going to leave out the details, but if I wrote everything I knew someone would have been fired and someone else would have felt publicly burned (not by me).
I was well within the ethics of journalism to do the story. I would not have been violating anyone’s trust. I would not have been going back on any agreements about going off the record. But I would have felt slimy. I was stuck. I called a few in the business who I’d trust with my life and they were generally split. It could have gone either way.
In the end, I decided to follow what felt right to me. I kept the most salacious parts in my notebook. I didn’t get into this weird business for anyone to credibly say I played Gotcha.
I’m not bringing any of this up to fish for compliments. Rather, I’m telling you this because I know a lot of young writers read this stuff and I want them to know the real secret I’ve been keeping:
It’s that anyone who does this job will run into these moments where they can cash in some piece of insight to boost a story while violating a source’s trust or a reasonable person’s definition of what’s right. But if you can resist that temptation, there is a strong chance that the news value will come back to you with interest.
Some of the people involved in the story I mentioned a few paragraphs up have become great sources for me. That’s not why I handled it the way I did, but my point is that even if my only guiding principle was doing what’s best for my career … the better move was discretion.
Did I answer your question? Kind of?
This week, I’m particularly grateful for this fantasy football league I’ve been in for most of the last 20 years. This is a completely dorky thing, but I think a lot of you might be able to relate: Some of my closest friends live overseas, and even with those who live closer it can be hard to get together because life pulls all of us in different directions.
One of the biggest constants with one group of us has been this nerdy fantasy football league, and if it takes some obnoxious trash-talking or trading Davante Adams to maintain some of that connection, then here’s one more reason that sports are awesome.
This story was originally published August 31, 2021 at 5:00 AM.