ATLANTA
There isn’t much that Kansas City Royals catcher Salvador Perez hasn’t seen. That’s to be expected for a 15-year veteran in Major League Baseball.
On Friday night, however, Perez had a new challenge on his hands. And he passed his initial test with flying colors.
Perez won three Automatic Ball-Strike (ABS) system challenges. He identified three strike calls that home plate umpire Doug Eddings missed. The pitches were narrowly in the strike zone, and Eddings had ruled each a ball.
Perez wanted another look. He tapped his catching helmet and requested an official replay review. Each time, the ABS system — used in a regular-season game by the Royals and Braves for the first time — confirmed Perez’s judgment.
On all three occasions, the overturned calls altered the pitch count in the Royals’ favor.
“I’ve got a pretty good idea (of the strike zone),” Perez said. “Maybe side to side is a little hard. Up and down, I have a pretty good idea. I thought it was a strike and I took my chance.”
Perez challenged a 94 mph fastball thrown by Royals starting pitcher Cole Ragans in the fourth inning. The ball crossed the plate at the bottom of the strike zone and Eddings called it a ball. The official review took 5-10 seconds before the call was overturned.
An inning later, Perez won consecutive challenges with Braves hitters Eli White and Maurcio Dubon at the plate and reliever Bailey Falter on the mound.
“In the big leagues, it’s about one pitch,” Perez said. “Anything can happen with one pitch.”
Perez was happy with the outcome of his challenges. However, he expressed concern with how the overturned calls would affect his stats as a catcher.
That’s something he said he would like to take a closer look at.
“It’s bad for us because my numbers are gonna look bad,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what they call, they aren’t gonna change that (the official decision in the scorebook).
“I feel like I was doing a pretty good job with my glove. It was a strike and he called ball. I challenge and they are going to turn it around as a strike. But my numbers are gonna be negative, you know? I don’t know. They should change the pitch and they should change everything.”
Perez believes catchers shouldn’t be penalized analytically for blown calls they challenge and get overturned. But he’s glad his swift thinking prevented any big innings in Friday’s opener against the Braves. Atlanta won with three big swings that produced home runs.
“It’s definitely big pitches that he is challenging,” Ragans said of Perez. “Obviously, he has been doing this a long time and knows the strike zone pretty well. So yeah, when we do get it overturned like that when we’re on defense, that’s a big swing.”
Ragans took the loss in Friday’s 6-0 shutout. He allowed four runs across four innings while walking four batters.
The Royals will continue to lean on Perez behind the plate. The ABS challenge system is being introduced officially across the majors season after being tested at the minor-league level and in spring training.
“We thought Salvy would be good at it,” Royals manager Matt Quatraro said. “Last year, before we were using it for real, he was good at the reviews and the stuff we would do with the IPad and the (strike) zone. Clearly that helped us save some pitches, and that was good for us.”
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Jaylon Thompson covers the Royals for The Kansas City Star. He previously covered the 2021 World Series and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Jaylon is a proud alumnus of the University of Georgia.