Salvador Perez and His Aggressive Plate Approach

Sep 23, 2013; Seattle, WA, USA; Kansas City Royals catcher Salvador Perez (13) hits a RBI single against the Seattle Mariners during the 8th inning at Safeco Field. Mandatory Credit: Steven Bisig-USA TODAY Sports

I was at Target Field, watching a game with my wife. We had fantastic seats and I could get a great look at each player as they came up to bat.

When Salvador Perez walked up to bat, I leaned over and said, “You can just tell that there is more power in those haunches.”

That’s an odd statement out of context and perhaps a strange one even within context. I regret sharing that with you, and I regret further that I leaned the wrong direction and said that not to my wife, but to the older woman sitting next to me.

OK, I made that last part up, but it would’ve been funny to see the look on a stranger’s face if you’d begin to talk to them about how strong the 6’3″, 245 pound Sal Perez looks through his seat and thighs.

"haunch |hônCH, hänCH| noun a buttock and thigh considered together, in a human or animal. • the leg and loin of an animal, such as a deer, as food: haunch of caribou meat."

Perez is a not-quite-unique hitter and we need to look at his numbers (and haunches) with different eyes. In fact, we should look at the Kansas City team differently as well. They’ve loaded up on aggressive, high-contact hitters who excel and getting the ball into play early in the at bat.

We are conditioned to target batters with a keen batting eye that we have grown to frame as a high walk rate and low strikeout totals. We’d be correct in doing so but Sal Perez and a handful of other players such as Adrian Beltre, Pablo Sandoval, Yadier Molina and – lately – Carlos Gomez, who don’t fit this mold.

Perez has an aggressive approach at the plate, not like a Bryce Harper who has a strong, violent swing, but aggressive in the sense that Perez jumps right into the at bat. He’s not waiting for pitches, nor taking many looking. He’s swinging at the first ‘good enough’ pitch and getting it in play.

These fewer pitches per at bat means he won’t draw many walks but rarely will he get to three strikes either. Contrary to some conventional thinking, he’s not impatient at the plate, nor is he lost.  This is his intentional approach and it works great for him.

As a result, I don’t see his walk rate ever climbing higher than 5%, but in the same vein, I don’t expect him striking out at more than a 12-13% clip. He gets away with this approach because he has a freakish contact percentage of 87.4%, which is not quite on the level of new teammate Norichika Aoki, but can any of us hope to make Aoki contact, especially if we have large, full haunches?

The moral of the story is that when his dad told him to keep his eye on the ball as a kid, little Sal took to that with the utmost of seriousness.

This level of contact is key in that the league average for BABIP (batting average on ball in play) hovers around .295-.305, meaning that since Perez puts so many balls in play (as line drives to boot, as evidenced by his 20.5 % LD%) so frequently he’s going to give your fantasy baseball team a boost in AVG.

Now let’s get back to those powerful haunches. He’s a big, strong man. He doesn’t look like he was weened on protein shakes like Giancarlo Stanton, but you do get the sense that there is potential for him to drive even more balls out of the yard, provided he gets a little more lift on them.

I, like the lady sitting next to me at Target Field, just look his hips and predict upwards of 15 homers in 2014, with potentially 20 in his prime. Remember, he’s just 23 years old.

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