O Captain! My Captain!
Salvador Perez may have a few more tricks up his sleeves for the Royals as they continue to climb back toward .500.
It appears that Salvador Perez still has his fastball. It likely hasn’t been the season he envisioned for himself coming off the success of 2024, but he has certainly turned things on lately, and particularly in July. And last night, the oldest position player teamed up with the youngest to give the Royals a fourth straight win and a sweep of the Pittsburgh Pirates. You can never expect a sweep, but it sure is nice when they happen. And it’s tough to be in a position where you need a sweep as a team, but the Royals sort of needed that given where they were in the standings.
I’ll get to Perez’s heroics and the other absolute tank that was hit last night, but something I was thinking about on the way home from the ballpark is how perception changes things. The Royals have now been exactly two games under .500 six different times. At 2-4 and 3-5, nobody really cared. At 8-10, things were feeling iffy because they were falling. At 12-14, they were on their way back up. At 34-36 the season was over. At 36-38, it was on the way back. At 38-40, it was on the way back down. And now at 46-48, it feels better than any of them because it feels like there’s a chance. The Royals have to take care of business against a good team this weekend to maintain that chance, but it feels like there’s a chance.
And that’s because of Perez and Jac Caglianone. I still think it’s an absolutely wild statistic that before Monday’s game, the Royals had yet to hit multiple home runs in a game at home this season. With three more last night, they hit at least two home runs in every game of this series. And let’s not pretend that the Pirates are some trash pitching staff. They entered the series seventh in baseball in ERA. They had allowed the second-fewest home runs in baseball with 78. The Royals hit nine against them! The only time this year the Royals have hit more than nine in a three-game span was the 10 they hit surrounding the seven-home run game in Baltimore. It’s the most homers the Pirates have allowed in a three-game stretch this season. Baseball, man.