Salvador Perez's underrated and overlooked season

 

July 12^th 2021, Denver Colorado, the site of this year’s Home Run Derby. An event where the best power hitters in the Majors come together and compete to see who the best is of the best is. One name on that list seemed odd at the time, Kansas City Royals catcher Salvador Perez. A catcher who at most had hit twenty-seven home runs in season, who for the past few seasons had dealt with injuries. He was matched up with New York Mets first baseman Pete Alonso, the defending Derby champion, and it didn’t look good for Perez. Alonso hit thirty-five during his round, and no one gave Perez a shot. ESPN, the network hosting the event, decided to interview Alonso about his performance in the middle of Perez’s round. Perez would not go down without a fight. While the broadcast focused in on Alonso and barely gave mention to the Royals catcher, Perez put on a show, mashing twenty-eight home runs. Yes, he would lose, but at the end of the competition his mark was the second best of the night, and Perez proved the doubters wrong. If anything sums up Salvador Perez’s season it’s this moment. Overlooked and underappreciated.

In the offseason the Royals awarded Salvador Perez a four-year contract extension worth 82 million dollars. The highest in Royals’ history. At the time many considered this an overpay for a catcher on the wrong side of thirty with multiple injury concerns. No one thought he could replicate his success from the shorted 2020 season. In truth he didn’t replicate it, he surpassed it. He broke the single season record for homeruns by a catcher with forty-eight, which was tied first in the majors and first in Royals history, and led the league in RBI’s with 121. You would think that these accomplishments would be praised and celebrated, but instead at the very least it’s ignored, if not disregarded entirely.

If you take a look at social media in response to Perez, you’ll get the follow criticisms of his game: He’s a bad pitch framer, he can’t get on base, he doesn’t walk, he swings at everything, he isn’t a full-time catcher, and more. While some of these criticisms of his game are valid, just think about what Perez accomplished.

Royals second baseman and utility man Whit Merrifield said it best after the season was over: “It’s hard to understand what catching 130 games in Kansas City — in the heat that we have and the weather that we get and the humidity that we have — what that does to someone’s body and to someone’s legs and what your legs mean to your swing.”

Catcher might be the hardest position in baseball. You have work with your pitchers, develop a gameplan, stay on your knees for hours, control the run game, and then you are expected to hit. Perez did that. Perez tied the record for the most games played in a season by a primary catcher. He played 161 games and caught 124 games. He also threw out 44% of attempted base stealers this season, the highest percentage of any catcher with at least 375 innings caught. To do that all and put up those hitting numbers is amazing. Not to mention doing in it playing in Kauffman Stadium, an incredibly friendly park for pitchers and not hitters. And while Jorge Soler broke the homerun record for the Royals in 2019, it’s a bit different here.

“People don’t do that, you just don’t do that,” Merrifield said. “Soler DHed for the most part when he was here, and I’m sure his legs were a lot fresher than Salvy’s. So it’s apples to oranges, and it’s just amazing to watch.”

So, the question becomes, does Perez deserve to win MVP? Well no. What Shohei Ohtani has done this season is unreal. He did something we haven’t seen since the days of Babe Ruth, and he did it at an elite level. Yet that’s not to discredit what Perez has done. The only primary catcher to lead the league in homeruns and RBIs is Johnny Bench, the same person Perez took the record from. That’s good company. If anything, it’s to point out just how hard the MVP is to win. All that any Royals fan asks is for Perez to get the rightful respect that he deserves and to be recognized as the best catcher in the game today.

At the end of the season, Perez failed to break the Royals homerun record and the Royals lost their final game two games to the Twins. Perez wasn’t sad though; he was his cheerful and optimistic self:

“I’m happy the way I finished the season. It was a lot of hard work, it’s enough, it’s good, I thank god for that, maybe to hit forty-nine would have been better(laughs)…and the thing is, we’re going to get better...”

You can see why Royals fans love him. He just loves the game and works hard to get better. He doesn’t let the critics get to him. So keep under appreciating him and doing interviews in the middle of his Derby appearances, because Perez is just going to keep working and proving you wrong. As Royals manager Mike Matheny said:

“Guys like Salvy are making up with intelligence and training more specifically, taking advantage of all of the scientific improvements that we’ve had — all of that combined makes sense to why he is now becoming the kind of hitter that he is,” Matheny added. “I don’t see that going anywhere anytime soon.”