What Salvador Perez is doing for the Royals is unprecedented. The story behind it
The chant started by the time Salvador Perez completed the high-five line in the Royals dugout, his mononymous (at least locally) nickname ringing through the largest crowd at Kauffman Stadium since Opening Day.
He waltzed up the dugout steps, turned toward the 25,000 in attendance and lifted his helmet in the air, once and then twice.
And there it was: a signature moment three days after the franchise’s signature opening month.
Perez blasted a three-run homer to cap the separating six-run seventh inning in the Royals’ 7-1 win Friday night against the defending world champions.
“When he goes,” said Michael Massey, the man behind him in the lineup, “we go.”
They’ve been going a lot.
Player.
And team.
The Royals are 20-13, half a game shy of a division lead, and what was once a cautious buzz in Kansas City is starting to grow louder — booming, actually, as Perez sent a baseball into orbit toward the visiting bullpen Friday.
He is no longer the leftover reminder from what once was but now the axis on what is.
His previous curtain call, he surmised, must have come in 2021, when he broke a franchise record with 48 home runs in a season. But there was a distinct difference Friday that he did not note.
This one mattered — for more than personal achievements.
The Royals are fun again, and they’re fun because of the guy who never left as much as because of those who have only recently joined him.
All he ever wanted.
Five months ago, he sent a succinct text message, just six words as the recipient recalled, but that was enough to make Royals general manager J.J. Picollo wince.
I need to talk to you.
The message came in mid-December, as the Royals were in the midst of implementing their offseason blueprint. But upon its arrival, Picollo picked up the phone and called Perez almost immediately.
“You don’t really know where this is going,” Picollo said.
Turns out: “I just wanted to tell him how excited I was about everything we were doing,” Perez said. “(Majority owner) Mr. (John) Sherman, he was spending a lot of money. I think the best way to repay him is to win some games and make the playoffs. So, yeah, it gave me a lot of energy.”
That’s the backdrop for the best March and April combination in the career of an eight-time All-Star catcher who will turn 34 in a week.
But it was actually just the continuation of a previous chat.
Last summer, the Royals took calls on Perez at the trade deadline, at least one discussion advancing far enough that they notified him of it. But before it made it that far, Perez requested a meeting with Picollo. That could have gone one of two ways: a demand to stay (with the 10-and-5 rights giving him trade veto power) or a demand to go.
Or, apparently, a third option: It wasn’t a demand at all.
It was a question.
What’s the plan? How far away are we?
“He’s always been clear that he just wants to win, and that his preference is to do it here,” Picollo said. “I was honest with him. I told him I’d love to say it will be next year, and that between the development of our own players and being able to access and acquire other players, a lot of things have to happen.”
The early returns on each are affirming. Starting pitcher Seth Lugo looks like a bargain, with the caveat that he is one month into a two-year deal with a player option for a third year. And shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. looks just about as valuable as any player in the game.
But mixed into the center of the best pre-May win total in Royals history is the player mixed into the center of the last time Kansas City had a winning team.
Perez.
Think of this: Perez had more hits (38), home runs (7), RBIs (26), runs (14) and walks (10) than any April in his 13-year career. He had a higher average, slugging percentage and walk rate than any April of his career.
At 34.
This isn’t just unprecedented by his standards.
But by any standard.
These kinds of seasons don’t happen at 34. Not for his position.
In the last two decades, only two catchers have posted better than an .804 on-base-plus-slugging percentage (OPS) in their age-34 seasons or older. Jorge Posada did it twice, and A.J. Pierzynski did it once.
And only Posada has ever posted one better than .874.
Perez finished Friday night with a 1.018 OPS.
That won’t be his final season line — and neither will the .351 batting average that puts him atop the American League. He also trails in the AL home run race by one, and he has driven in more runs than anyone in baseball.
Truth is, I don’t how long any of it lasts. The Kansas City Royals have one of the top-performing starting rotations in baseball. The lineup seems to have an uncanny way of bunching all of its baserunners together in the same inning. It works, but it’s probably not indicative of long-term solutions. The bottom of the order will need to produce at some point.
But I do know that word — need — has a different bar, and a different reasoning than it did just six weeks earlier.
Perez has been talking a lot about the playoffs lately, but really, he’s been talking about the playoffs always. He is the guy in the clubhouse — the only guy in the clubhouse — who knows that feeling here.
It makes it all the more remarkable he stuck through the last nine years, and not purely by contractual obligations but because he couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to bring that back.
We’re 33 games into a 162-game season. But the Royals are not out of the race by May 3. They have instead totaled as many wins on May 3 as they had on June 20 last year. They have the best run differential in baseball.
They’re in it.
They just might be real.
When’s the last time we could say that?
And the man at the heart of that sentence last time is the man at the heart of it now.
