Salvador Perez’s Disturbing Trends

It was another productive season from Salvador Perez, at least from a fantasy baseball perspective. He earned the fifth most value among catchers and set a new career high in plate appearances and homers. But all is not well.

Since his debut, Perez was a high contact guy, and as a catcher, was one of the rare batting average contributors, which made him a valuable fantasy baseball commodity. But this season he hit just .260, and it wasn’t entirely due to a career low .278 BABIP. Another part of the explanation is his declining ability to make contact. Check out these trends:

Salvador Perez K

Now of course a 14% K% and 7.8% SwStk% remain good and better than the league average. But without great power at the moment, this was Perez’s best skill, and it’s deteriorating. Perhaps even more disturbing is his penchant to swing and keep swinging. And he swings at everything — check out that O-Swing%!

Salvador Perez Discipline

Perez has always swung at more pitches than the average Major Leaguer, as well as more pitches outside the strike zone. But he’s taken that proclivity to an entirely new level this year. He ranked seventh in baseball in Swing% and second in O-Swing%. This hasn’t been so problematic in the past, but it has become so.

Salvador Perez Contact

So he’s swinging at more pitches, and those pitches are generally balls outside the strike zone. Considering Perez also never walks, there’s literally no incentive whatsoever for pitchers to throw him strikes. And since he’s having more difficulty making contact with those pitches, it’s even more beneficial for pitchers to just quit throwing him strikes.

Vladimir Guerrero was the poster child for this approach, swinging at everything, including pitches outside the zone. And his O-Contact% was significantly lower than Perez’s. But the difference is that Guerrero was willing to take a walk. He posted an 8.1% career walk rate and typically posted marks in the high single digits and low double digits during his prime. On the other hand, Perez has yet to post a walk rate above the 4.4% mark he posted during his debut in 2011.

Aside from the questionable plate discipline, he has also suddenly come down with a pop-up problem. He actually led all of baseball in IFFB%, which tells you right there why his BABIP sat at a career low. Essentially, nothing was really right with Perez’s approach at the plate this year.

Perez is a rather large man and he therefore looks like a guy who could enjoy a true power breakout in the near future. But his batted ball distance has declined in the last two seasons and his home run spike was due entirely to a surge in fly ball rate (and at-bats of course), rather than any sort of increase in HR/FB rate (which actually declined slightly). While hitters do alter their batted ball distributions, it’s not a common occurrence and the percentage play is to expect some regression in his fly ball rate toward the low 30% range he had done in prior years. So if we assume his home run total declines and we’re not sure his batting average will rebound, what are we left with? A catcher who is highly unlikely to earn the fifth highest fantasy value again in 2015.





Mike Podhorzer is the 2015 Fantasy Sports Writers Association Baseball Writer of the Year. He produces player projections using his own forecasting system and is the author of the eBook Projecting X 2.0: How to Forecast Baseball Player Performance, which teaches you how to project players yourself. His projections helped him win the inaugural 2013 Tout Wars mixed draft league. Follow Mike on Twitter @MikePodhorzer and contact him via email.

11 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Jon L.
9 years ago

Maybe Perez wore down as the year went on? His first-half stats were much more palatable. But he has real-life value behind the plate, so Kansas City may keep running him out there 140+ times a year even if his hitting suffers.