My vote for Royals Player and Pitcher of the Year
The Royals like to announce their annual awards in late January, tied to what normally is FanFest weekend. Salvador Perez won the Royals’ Player of the Year while Brad Keller captured the Pitcher of the Year honors. Alex Gordon was recognized for Special Achievement.
For the second year, I had the privilege of casting a ballot. It’s a small thing, but I kind of enjoy going through the process of how I decided my vote. This year, that process was simple.
Keller opened the season on the Covid list but ultimately recovered to start nine games. In five of those starts, he pitched at least five innings and didn’t allow a run. (One shutout, the first of his career, was in the bunch.)
And in five of Keller’s nine starts, the Royals offense supported him with three runs or fewer. The Royals still won two of those games, specifically because Keller was so strong. That may not seem like something (two wins? Big deal!) but it points to Keller keeping his team in the ballgame, for the most part. And in modern baseball, that’s usually all you’re asking of your starting pitcher.
Keller whiffed just 5.76 batters per nine. In 2020, there were 81 pitchers who threw at least 50 innings. Of those pitchers, Keller ranked 76th in strikeout rate. The lack of strikeouts has always been something that has confounded me when trying to decipher Keller’s success. Once Baseball Savant started visually graphing pitches by type, it became super-obvious.
It’s all about the angles. Keller is crushing opposing hitters with geometry. The sinker moves one direction, the four-seamer a little more counterclockwise, comparatively. And the slider is something else altogether.
With so many different looks on offer, hitters just have a difficult time squaring up against Keller. Last year, according to Statcast, he allowed a “barrel” in just 2.8 percent of all plate appearances and opposing hitters had an average exit velocity of 88.7 mph. Both measurements are very good compared to his fellow starters.
When Keller is on, his pitch chart looks something like this:
Sliders down (and in to left-handed batters, away from righties) and fastballs up. Not much in the middle of the zone. Success.
Keller did this so frequently in the abbreviated 2020 season, there really wasn’t another option to consider for Royals’ Pitcher of the Year. Greg Holland was a nice comeback story. Brady Singer had a very solid rookie campaign, making the jump from Double-A. And no one entertained me like Josh Staumont. But you can’t deny the quality that Keller brought to the hill in nearly every single start. It was an easy call: Keller got my vote for Royals’ Pitcher of the Year.
It was similarly simple on the position player side of the ballot: When he was in the Royals’ lineup in 2020, nobody raked like Salvador Perez. Among hitters with at least 100 plate appearances, Perez led the team in home runs, batting average, on-base percentage (!!!) and slugging. He also set the pace in wRC+ and in fWAR. You wonder what a year and a half away from the rigors of catching can do to someone like Perez with his off the field work ethic…question answered. Emphatically.
And like Keller, Perez missed time in 2020. He tested positive for Covid early in summer camp and then missed a chunk of games in late August and early September with blurred vision in his left eye. Overall, he only appeared in 37 games—just 62 percent of the season, that under normal circumstances, might have disqualified him from consideration. But nothing was normal in 2020, and when a player was sidelined twice from July onward after completing rehab from Tommy John surgery, the only thing you could do was exhale and thank the Baseball Gods that Perez was back in the lineup.
Perez’s 2020 season was built on the back of a powerful 2018. That sounds strange, given that Perez’s .439 slugging percentage in 2018 was below his career average and his .204 ISO was about 20 points below where he finished in 2017. But the Statcast metrics show a player who was scorching the baseball in 2018. That year, he was in the 92nd percentile in HardHit% and in the 88th percentile in Exit Velocity. In 2020 those rates were in the 85th percentile and 82nd percentile, respectively. Last year, his line drive rate jumped seven percent and more of those liners dropped in front of outfielders (or in the gaps or over the fence).
It would’ve been fun to have seen Perez hit over what should’ve been a full 162 game schedule.
Defensively, it was the Perez you’ve come to expect. He threw out three of 11 attempted stolen base thefts and allowed 12 wild pitches, which is right in line with what we’ve seen in the past, given the amount of time he spent behind the plate. He didn’t allow a passed ball all year—he averages around one every 200 innings behind the plate.
Perez finished with 1.9 fWAR. Adalberto Mondesi was second on the team at 1.4 fWAR. As electric as the shortstop can be, the first month of his season sunk any chance he would’ve had at this award. Likewise, Whit Merrifield (1.3 fWAR, third on the club) saw a horrific stretch in the middle of the season effectively short-circuit his candidacy. Such is the danger of the small sample in the abbreviated season.
Nope. The missed games didn’t matter. When he was healthy, Perez was simply the most dominant hitter in the Royals lineup.
Speaking of dominating, this was the year we bid farewell to Alex Gordon. The lifetime Royal went out in style, winning his eighth Gold Glove and picking up the second Platinum Glove of his career for good measure. The offense left his game five years ago and it hasn’t been easy to watch him struggle at the plate, but he’s still brought value to the franchise in so many ways. I wrote about his career in a post at Royals Review.
And that was good enough for me to cast my ballot for the Special Achievement Award for Alex Gordon.