Beware Sal Perez’s Horrifying Plate Discipline

If you were to take a peek at the current average ESPN live fantasy draft resultsfor catchers, you would see some familiar names in the top five. Buster Posey is obviously atop the list, and Jonathan Lucroy just finished fourth in the National League MVP voting. Devin Mesoraco had a breakout season, and Evan Gattis‘ huge raw power might outweigh his strikeouts, at least in the fantasy world.

Sitting fifth, ahead of Yan Gomes, Yadier Molina, Brian McCann, Russell Martin,Yasmani Grandal and everyone else, is the Kansas City Royals‘ Salvador Perez. Perez, who turns 25 in May, has increased his home run count every year he’s been in the bigs and saw his national profile grow exponentially during the Royals’ World Series run. He has a career .285 average and is one of only eight catchers with double-digit home runs in each of the past three seasons.

Based on that criteria alone, Perez’s high ranking looks to make sense, and that’s almost certainly why he is getting such respect in drafts. So why does it still seem so clear that he is being overvalued, perhaps to an enormous extent considering all the warning signs around him?

When Perez first came to the big leagues in 2011, he arrived with two reputations. First, a powerful right arm that would wreak havoc on opposing baserunners, which has held true, as only three catchers had a better caught-stealing percentage last year. The second, as ESPN’s Mark Simon detailed three years ago, was that he was a noted free swinger.

Simon’s 2012 opinion has proved prescient in 2015, because Perez has a serious aversion to walks, putting up a career 3.9 percent walk rate that makes him one of the few regular players over the past 30 years to walk less than 4 percent of the time.

At first, that didn’t matter, mostly because Perez also had solid contact skills, making contact 90.8 percent of the time in 2012. On pitches in the zone, that hasn’t changed. In 2012, he made contact on 94.5 percent of his swings in the zone; last year, it was still 92.8. He’s not suddenly forgotten how to make contact on good pitches.

Unfortunately for Perez, pitchers tend to pay attention and adapt as they learn more about an opposing batter, and adapt they have. They have simply stopped throwing Perez fastballs, or even as many pitches in the zone …

… because they know that even if they throw him junk off-speed pitches away from the plate, he is unable to lay off even though he is increasingly having difficulty contacting those pitches …

… and the overall outcomes will be increasingly poor and headed to unacceptable:

wRC+, or weighted runs created plus, is one of today’s leading offensive metrics, which in this case can be read as “Perez was 8 percent below average in 2014 after being above average previously.” IFFB%, or infield fly ball percentage, is another way to say popups, which is the lowest-success ball in play a hitter can have; no hitter in baseball did that more often than Perez in 2014. There’s no mystery there; even if you manage to make contact with a ball outside the zone, it’s rarely going to be good contact.

As for HR/FB, that’s no mistake: Even though he is hitting more homers per season, he is hitting fewer homers per fly ball over the past three years. The increased seasonal total is due almost entirely to increased playing time, which the Royals have already said they plan to reverse in 2015, meaning that fewer homers feel like an inevitability.

These aren’t just a few numbers from a cherry-picked portion of time. These are some of a hitter’s most important metrics and are across Perez’s entire career, showing that this isn’t a slump, it’s a trend. Pitchers have learned Perez’s weakness, and they are exploiting it.

Even more concerning, it got markedly worse as 2014 proceeded. Just look at how eager Perez was to swing outside the zone in the second half and how easily it correlated with his whiff rate:

It’s a terrifying trend, especially since Perez somehow put up a 46/3 K/BB in the second half of last season, tied with Ben Revere for the fewest free passes of any qualified player. Put another way, here are five other players who also drew three walks in the second half of 2014: Clayton Kershaw, Ian Kennedy, Kyle Hendricks, David Buchanan and Tyson Ross. They’re all pitchers.

None of this is to say that Perez isn’t a valuable player or a big part of Kansas City’s hopes to make it back to the playoffs. The fact that he is making just $7 million — total! — between 2012 and 2016 and gave the Royals three team options totaling $13.75 million between 2017 and 2019 might be one of the most team-friendly contracts in all of sports. His defensive skills behind the plate, particularly in controlling the running game, are unquestioned. But neither of those things matter in fantasy baseball. In a game where only offensive numbers matter, there’s plenty of reason to believe that valuing Perez at No. 5 is out of line with what he is likely to provide.

Remember, this wasn’t a bad year. It’s a trend, and pitchers know that. Last fall, when Madison Bumgarnermade his name by putting up a legendary October performance, the final hitter he faced was Perez, who stepped to the plate with two outs in the ninth inning of Game 7 with Alex Gordon on third and the Royals down by one. Perez had a chance to make his own legend. Bumgarner threw six pitches, all fastballs. The first five pitchesweren’t anywhere near being strikes. An overeager Perez still swung at three of them, helping Bumgarner avoid walking the winning run on base for what probably would have been righty pinch-hitter Josh Willingham.

That left Perez in a two-strike hole for the sixth pitch, a borderline strike, which he popped out to Pablo Sandoval to end the World Series.

One at-bat in a big spot is hardly indicative of a full season or a career. It does serve as a reminder, however, that Perez’s secret is out. There’s no need to throw him a strike. He will help you get himself out anyway.