Roberto Perez and the Case for Improving an Already Improved Offensive Profile

Two springs ago, Roberto Perez stood at his locker in Goodyear, Arizona, bat in hand, having just finished a morning session in the cages. He was having a strong spring at the time and was more than willing to discuss why.

“I’m trying to be aggressive with every pitch,” Perez said. “It’s just a mindset. Don’t waste an at-bat. Just be ready to hit your pitch and drive it.”

And for that desire to reprogram his mentality, Perez went on to slash … [checks notes] …168/.256/.263. Oof. But then Gomes was traded last winter, and Perez posted a 3.0-WAR season. The 30-year-old captured his first career Gold Glove, slashing .239/.321/.452 with a career-high 24 homers in 2019, finishing with a 98 wRC+ (100 is a league average run-creation rate), generating offense at a clip 13 percent higher than the average catcher.

But as is the case with any greedy individual (we are nearing the holidays, after all), the natural reaction is to ponder if things could get even better. If so, perhaps we can take the word Perez said in 2018 — aggressive — and further apply it to his improved profile.

First, let’s note that Perez demonstrated an increased ability to drive pitches and make his contact count last season, particularly up the middle or to the opposite field. He belted 16 of his 24 homers to the non pull side, and Perez also increased his average fly ball distance from 314 feet in 2018 to 343 feet in 2019, per Statcast.

There wasn’t a drastic change in the number of fly balls from past seasons — they were up slightly — but he kept weak contact to a career low and cut his pop up rate nearly in half, important given that a pop up is really no better than a strikeout, a near guaranteed out. When paired with a career-high 11 percent barrel rate (think of barrels as the ideal combination of exit velocity and launch angle) and career-best .410 expected wOBA on contact (based on overall quality of contact), it’s easy to see some of the factors which led to the power surge.

Impressively, Perez did this while swinging at the same rate of pitches as he did in 2018 (59.5 percent). But what is important is how much more judicious the right-handed hitter was with his swings.

More of those cuts came on pitches in the strike zone — a little over a two percent jump — which occurred as he was also seeing three percent fewer offerings within the zone. At the same time, his chase rate, which was seven percent better than the league average last year, held steady with career norms.

Why is that notable? Well, Perez has always been credited with a great eye, but he put it to even better use in 2019. Given that the league slugs .524 on pitches in the zone compared to .223 on offerings outside of it, the way-too-simplistic notion of just swinging at strikes (no, really, it’s harder than that) reveals itself to be true.

— Perez on pitches in the strike zone: .286 average, .565 slugging percentage

— The league on pitches in the strike zone: .292 average, .524 slugging percentage

But why stop there? Thanks to Statcast, we can separate those pitches into even tighter windows, and it’s there that we see that perhaps Perez, armed with an increasing ability and confidence in driving the ball, could benefit from an even greater aggressiveness — the very thing he discussed wanting to be prior to 2018.

One of those areas is the center-center pitch, an offering Statcast refers to as a “meatball.” As you can guess, feasting on the meatballs, which only account for pitch location (not speed or pitch type), is a great way to inflate your numbers.

The league hit .344 with a .667 slugging percentage on meatballs last year, and Perez did even more damage, hitting .490 with a .922 slugging percentage on those types of offerings. However, while Perez devoured those pitches when he swung, he only offered at 66.4 percent of those in the meatball zone, nearly nine percent below the league average.

Nobody likes leaving meatballs on the table, but Perez, still a patient hitter at his core, may have let some hittable pitches pass safely.

That may have been fine for the old version of Perez, the one eager to generate offense by perhaps driving up a pitch count or drawing a walk, but last year’s version certainly flashed enough ability to perhaps punish those pitches with a more prolific propensity.

Now, in fairness, Perez only saw a meatball 6.7 percent of the time last year — 128 of them, to be exact — so, we’re only talking about a little over 11-12 more swings to bring him near league average. We should probably expand our sample size a bit to demonstrate where some added aggressiveness might benefit him.

To do this, we can play with one of Baseball Savant’s fancy new toys, their swing take profile. For a more detailed breakdown on what the tool does, be sure to read Tom Tango's blog — no, really, it’s helpful — but to lay it out as simply as possible, the profile attempts to assign a run value to every pitch that leaves the pitchers hand. From there, the values of each swing or take can be accumulated based on the location of the pitch, giving us a window into the run value added or lost within or outside the zone based on the swing or take.

The profile also helps us visualize how often a player swings at each sort of pitch — offerings land in the heart, shadow, chase or waste zones — and the dotted lines to the right of the image demonstrated the league average rate of swings and takes inside each area (Alex Hooper utilized this tool earlier this offseason to demonstrate Carlos Santana's elite eye).

As you can see, Perez generates a lot of value by not swinging at pitches in the chase or waste zones, and in fact, he was only completely fooled on the “waste” offerings four times in 2019. This is where his excellent eye plays such a vital role in his ability, but as you’ll also notice, he was below the league average in the zone where you’d generally want to swing, the heart.

Perez registered a .341 average with a .719 slugging percentage on pitches in the heart zone in 2019 -- both well above league average -- yet he swung at seven percent fewer of those pitches than the league this past year.

In terms of his swing take profile, that amounts to +5 runs generated on swings in the heart of the plate but -9 on takes. That feels almost criminal, as if Perez’s patient nature is robbing him of even better numbers. It’s the sort of thing it seems like he was referencing a few years ago when noted his aggressive desire to “start from pitch No. 1.”

Now, of course, none of this takes place in a vacuum, nor is anyone attempting to say it’s easy to make these sorts of adjustments, particularly for a player who has spent his entire professional life trusting his patience and eye.

If swinging at more pitches in an effort to target the heart of the plate leads to losing what he generates by not swinging at junk, perhaps the tradeoff isn’t necessarily worth it -- and to be fair, if Perez merely manages to come close to mirroring his 2019 production going forward, there won’t be much nitpick.

But Perez clearly has a knack for recognizing location. It would seem the next step in his evolution — assuming he hasn’t reached the peak of his capability — would be to utilize that attribute in an effort to hunt more pitches in the appetizing portion of the zone … and feast.

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