The past, present + future of Sal Perez, a KC Royals star who just keeps getting better
This isn’t supposed to happen. Are you kidding?
Home run after home run after home run (repeat until you get to 46), and just one missed game all season?
Come on. This can’t be real.
The Past
Salvador Perez wasn’t a prospect. Maybe we can start there.
Fourteen summers ago, 30 teams could have signed this Kansas City Royals superstar for scraps, and all 30 passed. Slow legs, slow bat, and where would he play?
At a tryout, as Perez began his sprint around the bases, a German shepherd broke free from a patrolwoman and chased him. Someone stopped the dog before it got to Perez, who was still a little shook when he heard his time.
“That’s the fastest I’ll ever run,” he quipped.
Rene Francisco, head of the Royals’ international scouting operation, signed Perez on the club’s first-ever trip to Venezuela. They offered him $65,000. There was no negotiation. There was no other offer.
The Royals built what Baseball America in 2010 called the best farm system in the history of its rankings. You could find Royals scouts who disagreed on who their best prospect was back then. Some liked Wil Myers’ bat. Others went for Mike Moustakas’ power. Eric Hosmer looked the part of a star from the beginning. The Royals had loads of left-handed pitching, and you know how scouts love left-handed pitching.
The only consensus came when you asked another question: Which prospect would you bet your life on having a long big-league career?
They all would say Salvy. Around that time, Francisco was asked what the Royals had seen in Perez as a teenager.
“We liked his energy,” Francisco said. “We liked this smile.”
The Present
Salvador Perez is at the height of his powers. He is a perennial All-Star who has never been better. This is Kansas City’s biggest baseball star since at least Carlos Beltran, and a man who could build a Hall of Fame career (more on that soon) without a season ever better than this one.
To choose one specific part of this season as more mind-bending than any other is a futile exercise, and here’s just one example:
We spend a lot of time talking about his home runs, and we should. Perez has hit 46 of them this season, tied with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. for the most in baseball. No primary catcher in the history of the sport — not Johnny Bench, not Gary Carter, not anyone in the so-called Steroid Era* — has hit this many home runs in a season.
* We pause here to note that Josh Gibson is perhaps the best-hitting catcher of all-time. He is said to have hit nearly 800 home runs in his career, and according to Baseball Reference records averaged 45 homers per 162 games played in the Negro Leagues.
We’ll get to the home runs, but first, did you realize Perez would be a valuable player this season even if he never hit a ball over the fence?
He leads all catchers in assists, base-stealers caught and innings. He leads the American League in fielding percentage and pickoffs. Thirty-one catchers have allowed more stolen bases while catching at least 100 fewer innings. Nobody has thrown out a higher percentage of those would-be base-stealers, and here’s a good example:
The pitch-tracking data we have generally hates Perez’s pitch-framing, and that’s a discussion we can have sometime, but let’s be honest. You didn’t click this link to talk pitch-framing. You clicked to talk dingers.
You know, until Mike Moustakas in 2017 the Royals had the saddest home run record in baseball: 36 by Steve Balboni in 1985, which might as well be a thousand years ago.
That record was used as a punchline about the Royals so many times it went from funny to tired to ironic and then a dozen other things. To be sure, some of this was the Royals not being very good for a long time, and some of it was the Royals generally focusing more on athleticism than power.
But!
A lot of it, too, was the Royals playing in one of the biggest stadiums in the majors. Camden Yards, for example, measures 364 feet to left-center. Kauffman Stadium — and the walls were moved in for a time — is 387 feet to the same spot. That’s a lot of right-handed power hitters flying out in Kansas City and home-run trotting in Baltimore.
Here, we get nerdy. Baseball Savant tracks every bit of batted-ball data you could imagine, including fly balls in one park that would be home runs in another, and vice versa. If all hitters played in neutral stadiums, Perez would have 49 home runs — five more than Shohei Ohtani, who ranks second.
A “doubter” is a home run that would have been out of seven or fewer stadiums — none of the other 19 hitters with at least 32 home runs have fewer than Perez’s six.
A “mostly gone” is a home run that would have been out in 8-29 stadiums, and a “no doubter” would have been gone at all 30 — and nobody has more of either than Perez.
Here’s a fun one: If Perez did all his hitting at Angel Stadium of Anaheim, he’d have 52 home runs. At the Rogers Centre in Toronto, he’d have 49. At T-Mobile Park (Seattle), Citizens Bank Park (Philadelphia) or Guaranteed Rate Field (Chicago): 57.
In short, setting any sort of league-wide home run record playing home games at Kauffman Stadium is a bit like setting a world record running in quicksand.
The second-craziest thing about Perez’s season is that he’s a one-day stomach bug in St. Louis away from playing in every Royals game this season. Catchers just don’t do that. They’re not supposed to. And, actually, that one game he missed he was so sick the KC training staff made him stay at the hotel. The lesson here: If you want to keep Perez out of the lineup you literally cannot let him come to the ballpark.
He is DH-ing more than ever this season. That’s true. He has 35 starts as a designated hitter compared with 119 at catcher, which basically means that when normal human catchers take a day off, Perez still hits (usually third in the order).
That adds to his counting stats, of course, as he’s hit 15 home runs as a DH. But his overall numbers aren’t drastically different — a .863 OPS as a catcher compared to .870 at DH.
Here’s a number for you: Assuming he stays healthy and in the lineup these last few games of the season, Perez will have played in 161 games this season, tying Hall of Famer Ted Simmons for the most all-time by a primary catcher.
Perez is almost comically resilient, taking foul tips off his fingers and helmet and thighs and telling trainer Nick Kenney it’s just a flesh wound.
Catchers are supposed to wear down in their 30s, but Perez is better than ever.
Catchers are supposed to wear down late in seasons, but Perez is still hitting home runs.
Makes you wonder what his future might be.
The Future
Salvador Perez has one of the more fascinating collections of contracts in modern baseball history.
He signed the first after playing just 39 big-league games in 2011. The Royals had never done a deal with a player so quickly. They still haven’t. Perez wanted the security. He grew up hitting rocks with broomsticks. He wanted to help his mother.
That first contract became so out of touch with Perez’s eventual stardom that the Royals made perhaps the unprecedented step of ripping up the end of it and giving him a bigger deal that was more in line with his market value. Then, this past offseason, with one year left on that second extension, the Royals signed him to another — four years for $82 million, with a team option for another year: a deal that many around the game considered player-friendly.
Imagine what he’d command now, hitting the open market after a season like this.
Perez is open about his goal of being inducted into the Hall of Fame someday. The truth is that measurements commonly used to evaluate Hall of Fame candidates show him to be short of baseball’s highest standard. He has a lot of work to do if he wants to reach Cooperstown — but not as much as he used to.
Since World War II, only six catchers have had a higher OPS in their age 30 and 31 seasons than Perez. Only Mike Piazza had a higher slugging percentage.
In his last four seasons, Perez is averaging 40 home runs per 162 games played. Just for conversation’s sake, let’s say Perez hits two more home runs this season and averages just 20 through the rest of his contract. He’d be eighth all-time in home runs by a catcher.
If he averaged 25, he’d fifth, behind Piazza, Bench, Carlton Fisk and Yogi Berra. He’d also be 36 years old, which is a good reminder of something he said recently.
He was talking about how he keeps his body strong enough to play so much baseball, and especially to play so much of it at the sport’s most demanding position. He’s a believer in cold and hot tubs — five minutes in 50-degree water, then five minutes in 106-degree water, repeating the process a few times.
He believes in getting the blood moving, and that the whole process helps him recover and stay fresh. He was asked if he thinks that’s why he’s hitting so well.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t do this for now. I do it for when I’m 36, 37, getting older.”