The Royals just signed one of the most accomplished players in club history beyond the next presidential election and honestly I’m a little woozy from all the different ways the next few hundred words could go.
Salvador Perez is signed through at least 2025 with a club option for 2026, the biggest contract the Royals have ever signed, worth up to $93.5 million.
It is objectively too much money for a baseball team in Kansas City to give to a big-bodied catcher already in his 30s. It is realistically a deal that was always going to happen because of what the baseball team in Kansas City believes and what the big-bodied catcher already in his 30s feels.
This is a great human story, about a mama’s boy from Venezuela who grew into one of the best catchers of his generation — a six-time All-Star, five-time Gold Glove winner, World Series champion and MVP and first-team All-MLB in 2020.
This is a great baseball story, about a partnership between club and player that transformed both and included the unprecedented act of a modern baseball team essentially ripping up a contract that had become too club friendly.
This is a great Royals story, about a team in baseball’s third-smallest market with a fan base that wants to love the men who wear the uniform but had become accustomed to watching them leave.
By the time this contract is over, Perez has a chance to have played more games than anyone in Royals history other than George Brett, Frank White, Amos Otis and Hal McRae. He will almost certainly have hit more home runs than anyone but Brett. And he will have made more money than them all — $138.8 million in his career if the option is picked up.
Truly: a dozen interesting stories could be told from this incredible accomplishment for Perez.
For our purposes here, we will focus on three.
1. John Sherman stays winning
This deal is more about Sherman than anyone else involved. Because we already knew Sal Perez had accomplished enough that a baseball team would make him wealthy. And we already knew that club officials loved Perez enough that they wanted that team to be the Royals.
What we didn’t know was whether Sherman would agree.
There are legitimate baseball reasons the Royals should not have done this deal, and we will get into them soon.
There are also legitimate business reasons — Sherman’s ownership is 18 months old and still without a full season or even a single game with fans. Even with a new TV contract that boosted revenue, Sherman had at least plausible deniability to say they could not do a deal like this right now.
It is instructive to remember that Perez’s contract is not the biggest the Royals have ever offered. The Royals offered Eric Hosmer more than $100 million, but in that negotiation then-owner David Glass knowingly did not match the front-loaded seven-year deal worth $147 million plus an opt-out that Hosmer signed with the Padres.
