Passan: Salvador Perez is back where he wants to be: Playing October baseball in Kansas City
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Jeff Passan, ESPN
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Before every game, Salvador Perez, the Kansas City Royals’ 34-year-old catcher, lathers his entire body with an icy balm to wake up his muscles. “Knee, shoulder, groin,” he said. “Everywhere.” He tapes up his body parts — different each night, depending on what’s sore — slides neoprene sleeves onto his thighs, and gets ready for another night in baseball’s most unforgiving job.
“I’m not 25 anymore,” Perez said this week.
That was a magical age. It was 2015. The Royals won their first World Series in 30 years, a series in which Perez captured MVP honors after hitting .364. He loved that postseason — the pressure, the pageantry, the stakes, all of it — and fantasized about great October performances to come.
Only a week ago did the Royals finally return to the playoffs. Eight awful seasons Perez waited, and now he’s back at Kauffman Stadium to conjure more magic, this time in a pivotal Game 3 of their American League Division Series against the New York Yankees. Of all the fantastic consequences of Kansas City’s baseball renaissance this year — the reignition from a fan base that had been dulled by losing, the emergence of Bobby Witt Jr. as a superstar, a turnaround from a 56-106 record to 86-76 — the one that satisfies veteran employees in the organization more than any is that Perez’s postseason drought ending.
It surprised none of them that Perez found himself in the middle of the Royals’ series-tying triumph Monday night at Yankee Stadium. Even at 34, approaching 1,300 career games as a catcher, he remains among the finest at the position. He is Kansas City’s captain, its cleanup hitter and, in Game 2, author of a home run that ensured Yankees starter Carlos Rodon’s tongue remained in his mouth after a first-inning celebratory wag.
Perez has made a career of damaging pitchers’ good times. He made his ninth All-Star team this season, hit 27 home runs, drove in 104 runs and managed to play 158 games, 91 of them at catcher. He spent the winter changing his catching style to frame pitches better and has found great success in reinventing himself. He is approaching 11,000 innings caught and 300 home runs hit, the type of gaudy numbers that are the domain of those inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. And two years ago, when Matt Quatraro was named manager, Perez was the first player he reached out to. He wanted to listen to what Perez thought about the Royals’ present and future.
“A huge goal of ours,” Quatraro said, “was to return him back to where we feel like he rightfully belongs in the game.”
That’s October. “This is what he lives for,” said Cole Ragans, the winning pitcher in Game 2 of the ALDS. Ragans learned this over the past year, when he grew into an ace under Perez’s tutelage. Even when Perez’ body barks at him and tells him men in their mid-30s weren’t built to catch regularly in the big leagues, he pushes through the physical challenges because he craves the mental ones.
“I love to think about the game,” Perez said. ” I want to be in charge. I tell these guys, give me all the pressure. I’ve got it. I want to think fastball, slider, curveball, how we got him out the last at-bat, what we do now, what he’s looking for. That’s why I love catching so much.”
For years, teams reached out to Royals general manager Dayton Moore inquiring about a trade. The Royals couldn’t move Perez. He is Salvy, progenitor of the Salvy Splash, owner of the No. 13, which someday will be retired. But at the end of last season, Royals GM J.J. Picollo asked Perez if he had any desire to play elsewhere. Picollo believed the Royals were close to turning a corner, and owner John Sherman pledged to spend money, but he did not want to keep Perez if Perez didn’t believe in Kansas City’s future.
“I talked to J.J. last year about that when we lost a lot of games,” Perez said. “A bunch of teams wanted me, but I don’t want to go. This is my second home.”
He means it — after 13 years in Kansas City, Perez is the guy who will see a whiffle ball game going on in a neighborhood and stop to play a game with the kids. Perez gets reciprocal love from the city that remembers his walk-off hit in the 2014 AL wild-card game like it was yesterday and will pack Kauffman Stadium in hopes that the Royals can do what they did the last time they faced the Yankees in the postseason, in 1980: Win a five-game series.
When asked Tuesday about Yankees third baseman Jazz Chisholm’s comments after the Royals’ 4-2 victory in Game 2 — “They got lucky” — Perez abandoned his happy-go-lucky norm, turned terse and declined to say anything. In October, there’s no time for nonsense. It’s time to go home — after 17 days on the road to finish their season and wipe out Baltimore in the wild-card round, Perez was forced to do his own laundry in the hotel for the first time in his life — and show his teammates what postseason games are like s at Kauffman Stadium.
“‘How’s it going to look?'” Perez said they’ve asked him. “‘How’s it going to be? How loud is it going to be?’ We have the best fans ever. Even in the bad moments, they were there for us.”
They’ll be there Wednesday and Thursday. Playoff games across the parking lot at Arrowhead Stadium are old hat, but at the K? They’re special, and they wouldn’t feel quite right without Salvador Perez, the heart of his team. So he’ll arrive early, go through his routine, prepare his body, jog onto the field at 7:06 p.m. and squat in his second home, his city, the only place he wants to be.
Sports
‘I told them the best option was him’: Pete Alonso showing why he’s the guy Juan Soto wanted hitting behind him
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Jorge Castillo
NEW YORK — Juan Soto had several questions for the New York Mets during his free agent negotiations this past winter. One was about their lineup construction.
Soto had just spent the 2024 season in the Bronx as half of a historically productive duo who drew constant comparisons to Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. He and Aaron Judge, the American League MVP, were a strenuous puzzle to solve in the New York Yankees‘ lineup. The left-handed Soto hit second. The right-handed Judge batted third. They protected each other and pulverized pitchers. Leaving the Yankees would mean leaving Judge.
“That was one of the essential parts of the discussion,” Soto told ESPN in Spanish on Tuesday. “Who was going to bat behind me?”
The answer seemed clear. Pete Alonso remained a free agent. The first baseman is homegrown and adored in Queens. More importantly, for lineup construction purposes, he’s a right-handed slugger. He isn’t on Judge’s level — who is? — but he ranks right behind Judge in home runs since debuting in 2019. He was an obvious complement to Soto.
“I told them the best option was him,” Soto said.
By late January, Alonso’s return still appeared unlikely. Mets owner Steve Cohen, during a fan event at Citi Field, called the negotiation “exhausting” and “worse” than the Soto pursuit. He left the door open, but much to the chagrin of Mets fans in the crowd that day, he also said the organization was ready to move on from the four-time All-Star.
Less than two weeks later, just days before spring training, the sides came to an agreement on a two-year contract with an opt-out after this season. The 30-year-old Alonso went from seemingly in the Mets’ past to protecting the franchise’s $765 million investment. Two months into the partnership, the early returns of the 2025 season support Soto’s opinion. The best example came in Tuesday’s win over the Miami Marlins.
The Mets, leading 6-5, had runners on the corners with one out in the sixth inning for Soto. Marlins manager Clayton McCullough brought in right-hander Ronny Henriquez — and, despite the runner on first, made the unusual decision to intentionally walk Soto. That loaded the bases for Alonso and created an inning-ending double-play opportunity with a righty-righty matchup — though McCullough made another unusual call by pulling in the infield and the outfield. Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said he wasn’t surprised by the Marlins’ decision to walk Soto.
“I think it gets to a point where it’s pick your poison there,” Mendoza said.
Two pitches later, Alonso cracked a 93-mph sinker into the left-center field gap for a bases-clearing triple, blowing the game open on a cold, blustery afternoon in Queens.
It was Alonso’s second double of the day — his first, a Texas Leaguer to right field in the third inning, drove in the Mets’ first two runs. Alonso has served as the offense’s engine in the three hole, behind leadoff man Francisco Lindor and Soto, batting .333 with three home runs, 15 RBIs and a 1.139 OPS through the club’s first 12 games.
“It seems like teams are trying to not get beat with Soto,” Mendoza said. “And then, before you know it, they’re making mistakes with Pete, and he’s been ready to go and making them pay.”
Alonso is looking to reverse a three-year decline in offensive production, making better swing decisions after the worst offensive campaign of his career in 2024. It’s early, but so far Alonso is laying off pitches outside the strike zone more often. He’s barreling pitches over the plate at a higher percentage. He’s crushing pitches the other way — in the Mets’ home opener Friday, he clubbed a 95-mph fastball from Kevin Gausman down and out of the strike zone for a two-run home run to right field.
Hitting behind Soto, who has a .404 on-base percentage as a Met, has made his work a little easier.
“He’s such a pro,” Alonso said of Soto. “Obviously, we know he has power, he has the hit tool. He can hit for average. Super dynamic player offensively. But the thing that I really benefit from is just seeing — because he sees a ton of pitches and just kind of seeing what they’re doing to him, obviously, it really helps because they’re trying to stay away from the middle of the zone with him and I can kind of take some mental notes with that.”
With more pitches to Soto, the game’s most disciplined hitter, comes more strain for pitchers. With more runners on base, comes more pitches — and fastballs — over the plate for Alonso to devour. It is a formula Soto envisioned over the winter. Whether it extends beyond this season remains unknown.
There’s no question he is popular with fans. During the Mets’ home opener Friday, Citi Field roared for Alonso during pregame introductions. The fans did so again when he stepped into the batter’s box for his first at-bat. And then once more, moments later, when he emerged from the dugout for a curtain call after hitting a two-run home run.
This week, one option for replacing Alonso was taken off the board when first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and the Toronto Blue Jays agreed to a 14-year, $500 million contract extension. Guerrero’s contract should help Alonso’s earning potential if he chooses, as expected, to opt out of his contract and hit free agency again this winter.
For now, in his seventh season, Alonso is thriving as the Mets’ first baseman, hitting behind his team’s most valuable player.
“That’s why you want [protection] like that,” Soto said. “First of all, to have the chance to do more damage and stuff. But whenever they don’t want to pitch me, I know I have a guy behind me that could make it even worse for them.”
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