The Royals played a baseball game, which means Salvador Perez played a baseball game. That’s how it works. The Royals have played 131 games now. Perez has played in all but one, and that was because he was so sick he watched the game from his hotel room.
Literally: the only way the Royals have kept Perez off the field is by not allowing him in the stadium.
He turned 31 in May, which means he’s at the age that many scouts have expected him to fade. This is when his production was supposed to dip, his energy diminished. Maybe he’d need to move off catcher.
Instead, well, you know what’s happened. He is one of the most popular, important, and best players to ever make a home in Kansas City and he is now — somehow, despite it all — at the height of his powers.
He does it with an infectious joy that has long been his most defining trait. The source of that joy is the point of this column, and we’ll get to that soon, but first we need to at least try to put what he’s doing in perspective.
Let’s start with the surgery. The lowest point of Perez’s professional career. The Royals had lost 104 games the year before. Perez performed well — another All-Star team, another Gold Glove, another Silver Slugger — but he wasn’t the same. Ned Yost, the manager at the time, openly wondered if the losing had begun to sap his star catcher’s energy. Then Perez’s elbow snapped.
There simply is not much precedent for catchers returning strong from Tommy John surgery, especially into their 30s. That’s another way of saying there is not much precedent for Salvador Perez, because look:
Before the surgery, Perez hit .266/.297/.442.
Since the surgery, Perez has hit .290/.324/.565. He has 31 doubles, 49 home runs and 126 RBIs.
This is a stretch of production that puts him with some all-time greats. He went homerless on Tuesday for the first time in nearly a week, but his 38 home runs this season are 11 more than his previous career high and rank eighth all-time for a primary catcher.
Have a look at the rest of the top 10: Johnny Bench (twice), Javy Lopez, Todd Hundley, Roy Campanella, Mike Piazza (three times) and Carlton Fisk.
With a shade more than a month to go this is already Perez’s best season by Baseball Reference’s WAR, with his 4.4 mark ranking eighth among American League position players.
Perez has opened his stance a bit and exaggerated his leg kick. He has consistently complimented hitting coach Terry Bradshaw with providing him data that’s helped him lay off certain pitches in certain situations, and unload on others.
But it would be a lie to say Perez is a drastically different hitter. He’s still among the game’s most aggressive swingers — the most aggressive this season, actually — with a walk rate that nearly matches his career numbers and a strikeout rate that’s tracking for his worst.
The biggest obvious difference is unsatisfying as an explanation: he’s simply hitting the ball harder, and more often.
OK, we promised you the story of where that joy comes from. Maybe you remember the night three weeks ago when he celebrated the 10-year anniversary of his big league debut with two home runs in a win over the Yankees.
He was asked about that joy, and his response should be posted in every professional team’s locker room:
“I like to make people happy because you never know how much they sacrificed to buy the ticket to see you play. That’s why I always say, We need to play hard every inning, because you don’t know how hard people worked, or whatever they have to do to buy a ticket to come to see you. We need to respect the fans, too.”
Beautiful, right?
But that’s only part of the story. He’s telling us what’s in his heart, but not why.
A man doesn’t achieve so much — seven All-Star games, a World Series MVP and more than $140 million in career earnings — without something specific driving that joy. I wanted to know more, so I asked.
Why do you think about it like that, about fans sacrificing too much to give less than your best?
“Because that happened to me when I was young,” Perez said.
OK. And we’re off. Perez remembers going to games at his neighborhood stadium as a kid. Those ballplayers were heroes to him. Or, at least, the ones who played like they cared.
“Some players, they weren’t playing hard,” he said. “I lose respect for those players. That’s always stayed in my mind. I always think that way: We don’t know what they do to come to see me play, so we need to play hard. If you play hard, they’re going to be happy. If you don’t do nothing, it’s going to be bad. They’re going to go home sad.”
Perez guessed the tickets back then cost $2.
“Where I come from, that’s a lot of money,” he said. “We didn’t have that kind of money. So my mom or my dad had to do something to get money to buy tickets because they knew I loved baseball.”
Poor effort wasn’t just disrespect to Perez, then. It was also disrespect to his parents.
That memory was reinforced during Perez’s first week in the big leagues, before a game against the Yankees. He remembers Derek Jeter finding him before the game with a simple message: play hard, and be humble.
It’s something Perez said he keeps in his heart, and now that he’s an established veteran he passes the message on to younger players.
Perez still goes back to that stadium in Venezuela, by the way. He’s even played there a few times since making the big leagues, sometimes with other big leaguers, and the memory of seeing that disrespect as a kid has only been reinforced.
“Sometimes people do some stupid (stuff) — players, you know?” he said. “They’ll show up late … whatever. But when they come here (to the big leagues) they have to play hard. So why don’t you do the same thing there that you do here? You should do better in your country. That’s what I think, you know?
“But that’s something that I never forget. I don’t want to look like that.”
He’s 10 years into showing he never will.
