For a few years now, I’ve been waiting for Salvador Perez to break down.

There are three reasons for this. First, he’s at the intersection of two kinds of hitter who are at risk of precipitous decline: Big dudes who hit for a lot of power but don’t walk much and free swingers who need to make a lot of contact. Perez is one of seven players who have batted at least 4,500 times since the year 2000, with a career walk rate of 7% or less and a career ISO of .175 or more. The other six are Eduardo Escobar, José Abreu, Javier Báez, Nick Castellanos, Adam Jones, and J.T. Realmuto. That’s five guys who watched it go in a hurry and, well, stay strong, J.T., we’re all rooting for you.

The other point is that Perez plays the hardest position in the sport. Not only that, but he’s one of the biggest guys to ever play that position regularly (a man who weighs 255 pounds and crouches 200 times a day, six days a week has to have thighs the size of bike wheels) and he’s put in an unbelievable amount of time there.

Over the past 10 seasons, Perez has caught the fourth-most innings in MLB, despite missing an entire year due to injury. In his first five seasons as the Royals’ starting catcher, Perez was third, first, first, second, and fourth in the league in innings behind the plate.

In the past five or six years, Perez has suffered injuries to his eye, knees, and back — the body parts that start to go in your 30s even if you’re not strapping on the tools of ignorance five days a week — in addition to a healthy diet of acute baseball injuries: A concussion here, a torn thumb ligament there, as well as the torn UCL that cost him all of 2019.

Plus he’s old now, at least for a ballplayer. Perez is so old he had a cameo on Pitch. He’s so old he’s now played on two distinct good Royals teams. Only two other members of the 2015 Royals — Scott Alexander and Aaron Brooks — have played in the majors this year. And those two were only barely members of the 2015 Royals, pitching just 10 1/3 innings between them. One of Perez’s old Royals teammates, Chris Young, is now a World Series-winning GM.

And yet, at age 34, Perez is hitting .315/.383/.521. A little over two months into the season, Perez has 2.2 WAR and a 151 wRC+. He’s on track to blow away his career high walk rate (7.4%) and to post his lowest strikeout rate (16.0%) since 2015, when the leaguewide K% was 10% lower than it is now.

If Perez has anything like a normal second half, this is going to be the best full season of his career.

So what’s going on? How is he doing this?

In 2022, Perez battled a thumb injury for a big chunk of the season, limiting him to 114 games — his lowest total in a non-COVID-shortened season since 2012 — and a 108 wRC+. He played 140 games in 2023, but his bat regressed even further, to a borderline-unplayable 86. By all accounts he’s healthy this season, which is useful. The thumb is an important part of any human’s physical functionality; it’s what separates us from spider monkeys, some might say. If you have two working thumbs, you’re probably going to be better at baseball.

I mentioned earlier that Perez was one of the most-used catchers of the 2010s, which took a toll on him physically. The Royals, who rode their young backstop hard and put him away wet a decade ago, have lightened Perez’s workload significantly in the 2020s.

Let’s use Perez’s 2019 elbow surgery as a dividing line. (The real usage change didn’t come until 2021, but Perez caught so few innings in 2020 the numbers are about the same no matter on which side of the line that season goes.)

Before the elbow injury, Perez was making more than 93% of his starts and playing almost 100% of his defensive innings at catcher. Since coming back in 2020, Perez has moved around more, starting about a quarter of his games at DH and sprinkling in a start at first base a couple times a month. He’s playing every day; Perez appeared in 161 games in 2021, and as of this writing has gotten into 60 out of 62 Royals games this season.

But his catching volume has decreased dramatically. From 2013 to 2018, Perez caught 75.3% of Kansas City’s available catcher innings. Since 2020, that number has gone down to 55.4%. Making the big guy squat less comes with obvious physical benefits, but it also got Perez’s glove out of the lineup.

For most of his career, Perez has done a good job of controlling the running game and bounced between below average and above average at blocking. But most of the value catchers can add by their defense comes from framing, and at this, Perez has been one of the worst in baseball as far back as we can measure it.

Perez has put up some pretty wild offensive stats over his career, but his career high in WAR came all the way back in his first full season, 2013, at just 3.2. I was left scratching my head over how a catcher could lead the league in home runs, play almost every game, and still come away with just 2.7 WAR — this Perez did in 2021.

The answer is that for all his other positive attributes, Perez usually gives away double-digit runs in framing. In 2021, Perez was a minus-19.6 in framing runs. That’s nearly twice as bad, on a per-inning basis, as notorious framing butcher Kurt Suzuki was the same year. (Poor guy would’ve been a first-ballot Hall of Famer if he’d come along in the 1980s, before OBP was invented and we knew how to quantify framing.)

This year? Basically neutral: Baseball Savant has him in the 49th percentile for framing runs. Being merely average at something doesn’t sound impressive, but when the baseline is one of the worst in baseball, the effect is the same as going from average to elite.

And from a holistic perspective, those defensive gains have allowed Perez’s bat to pop. Are there signs of flukiness? Sure. It’s hard to trust a .347 BABIP from a hitter whose career BABIP is .291. But his wOBA is right in line with his xwOBA, and he’s actually underperforming his xSLG by some 60 points.

Perez has always swung a lot, always made a lot of hard contact, and always hit the ball in the air. This year, he’s just doing more of it. Perez’s GB/FB ratio (0.70) is the lowest of his career and his pull rate (53.3%) is the highest of his career. He’s in the 90th percentile or better for barrel rate, xBA, xwOBA, and xSLG.

When hitters pull the ball in the air, good things happen, and Perez is also doing that more. When Perez hits a line drive or a fly ball to the pull side this year, he’s hitting .635 and slugging 1.154. And because he’s such an active swinger with such a high contact rate, that happens a lot.

Pulled liners and fly balls account for 6.1% of the total pitches Perez has seen this year, the highest percentage in baseball, or 10.2% of his swings (eighth in baseball) and 28.9% of his total balls in play (10th in baseball).

Little wonder, then, that Perez is having such a good season. But what about his walk rate?

Once again, it’s not like Perez has made a massive change. He’s swinging — and, most importantly, chasing — as much as ever. But he’s made massive gains in the areas where pitchers want to pitch: the Shadow Zone, the area 3 1/3 inches either side of the edges of the plate and four inches either side of the top and bottom of the zone. This is where confusion reigns, where pitchers can get hitters to take strikes and swing at balls.

And probably because Perez swings at everything, he’s usually pretty good here. In 2023, he had better numbers in this attack zone than he did generally (.321 wOBA in the shadow zone vs. .308 overall). As a result, pitchers didn’t give him much to work with here.

Out of 341 hitters with at least 100 plate appearances last season, Perez was dead last in percentage of pitches within the shadow zone. But even in a lost offensive season, in this zone he was 42nd in wOBA and 27th in batting average. This season, he’s been even better.

On pitches in the shadow zone, he’s first in baseball in batting average, SLG, and wOBA, and second only to Aaron Judge in OBP. And on balls farther outside the zone, Perez has gotten more disciplined. This season, he’s swinging at 33.0% of pitches in the chase and waste zones, which is still one of the 10 highest marks in baseball and more than four times as high as the swing rates that Robbie Grossman, DJ Stewart, and Kyle Tucker are putting up on such pitches.

But it’s down from 38.4% last year, and Perez sees as many noncompetitive pitches as anyone in the league (37.9% this year, third-highest among hitters who have seen at least 200 total pitches).

These are all fine margins, especially with only 60-odd games’ worth of data. But Perez has made small gains in enough places, changed enough Fs to Cs on his report card, that his particular talents can shine through more than they have in years. Anyone would be lucky to “decline” so gracefully.

Source