Three hours before first pitch, Royals catcher Salvador Perez grabs a couple of his wooden bats and carries them to the hitting cage behind the Kauffman Stadium home dugout. Over the ensuing half hour, Perez and several teammates cycle through their pregame routines, taking swings at live pitching.Except Perez’s batting practice regimen comes with a quirk. After hitting waist-high pitches down the middle of the plate, Perez asks his coaches to throw him pitches outside the strike zone.
Off the plate. Above the hands. And most importantly, pitches just a foot off the ground.
“I have to (practice) hitting it because I don’t take that pitch,” Perez said. “So I gotta learn how to hit it. If you’re not going to take it, at least learn how to hit the low pitch.”
This year’s stats show that Perez has been swinging at a lot of those “bad balls” — more of them, in fact, than any other player in recorded history.
Perez, thus far, has swung at 50.2 percent of pitches thrown to him that are outside the strike zone. It’s a career high ... and it’s much more than that. Baseball Info Solutions, which has compiled plate-discipline data since 2002, has never tracked a player who has swung at more than 49 percent of pitches outside the strike zone.
― mookieproof, Thursday, 16 August 2018 19:44 (five years ago) link