Salvy smashes the Royals to victory

The captain provides the juice in a much-needed win as the Royals snap a six-game losing streak.

The Royals needed a win. Their captain delivered one.

On the back of a historic night at the plate, it was Salvador Perez who led the Royals to victory on Tuesday, snapping their six-game losing streak. Salvy left no doubt as he clubbed two home runs and a double, scoring twice and driving in four his team’s runs in a 6-1 thrashing of the Texas Rangers.

Man, it felt good to write that paragraph above.

Perez’s first home run came in the first inning. Boy, do the Royals need to put runs on the board in the first and snag an early lead. Anything to take some pressure off early to let their starters do their thing. The lack of offense is wearing on this team.

With the Royals ahead 1-0 already, thanks to a Maikel Garcia single that brought home Bobby Witt Jr., who doubled, Perez settled into the box against Jack Leiter. Leiter started the captain off by delivering a pitchout to see if Garcia would be running. No dice.

It’s not a bad idea to pitchout with Perez at the plate. No, he’s not going to chase that pitch (at least I don’t think so), but with Perez’s elevated chase rate—it’s a whopping 44.6 percent currently, among the worst in the majors—it doesn’t do a lot of harm to deliver ball one to see if a runner can be caught attempting to steal. Odds are strong an opposing pitcher can spin a couple of pitches away to get caught up in the count.

From there, though, Leiter fell into a fastball groove, delivering four in a row. He worked in and out with the pitch and varied his velocity just a bit, but we all know that’s not how you attack Perez. After the fourth pitch of the at bat, a 2-1 four-seamer at 96.6 mph on the inside edge, Leiter went away with another fastball, this one at 99.4 mph.

That four-seamer was Leiter’s fastest pitch on the evening, but it was one of his flatter fastballs. Perez was a tad late on the swing, but he got enough juice behind it to loft it to right and over the fence.

It was Perez’s shortest home run of the season, but that doesn’t matter, does it? That ball had some loft. I’d love to post up the arc of the flight from Statcast, but I guess the girders at Texas Rangers Warehouse Emporium Funzone interfere with the tracking parabolas or something. Or maybe it cannot measure baseballs that scrape a roof. It was high.

When you see something like that, you can’t help but admire Perez’s pure strength to get that baseball over the wall. That kind of validates the expected stats and whatnot we’ve been referencing at Baseball Savant that says he’s been hitting the ball on the screws, but has had some rough luck over the season’s first couple of months. Perhaps things are starting to turn…

In Perez’s second confrontation with Leiter, the Rangers right-hander kept throwing the four-seamer, but this time did mix in a couple of sliders and a changeup. Leiter missed on his first three pitches and fell behind 3-0.

Perez took a rip at that fourth pitch, a fastball on the outside edge. It could’ve been ball four, but the captain is not up there to walk. I hate to be a downer, but that’s a swing that will drive me bonkers. I’m good with hunting a 3-0 fastball. But it needs to be in the nitro zone. Middleish-middleish, if you know what I mean. This was not the 3-0 pitch to hack away at.

Otherwise, the chart above is pitching malpractice from Leiter. The sliders are up. So is the changeup. Those are Perez’s chase pitches…if they’re properly located. They weren’t so even though Perez swung and missed at the 3-1 slider, he wasn’t going to miss that changeup on the edge.

At 108 mph off the bat, it was the hardest of the three balls Perez put into play on the night. The double came with Vinnie Pasquantino at second—who stole the base! without a throw!—and scored him easily. Perez’s third RBI of the night padded the Royals lead to 4-0 at that point.

For their third confrontation, Leiter finally decided it was time to lean into his slider. A good plan, if a little tardy in its execution. In this battle, the first two sliders were well out of the zone. If Perez isn’t chasing sliders low and away, you’re nowhere close.

The third pitch was a courtesy four-seamer to get a strike. The fourth pitch was another slider. This one was elevated and in the zone. There would not be a fifth pitch.

The result was a near mirror image of his first home run, similar in exit velocity, launch angle and distance.

It was Perez’s 18th career multi-homer game, which moved him ahead of George Brett for most such games in franchise history. Thirteen of those games have happened since 2020.

It was also the third game of Perez’s career where he collected three extra-base hits. That seems like a low number to me, but Perez has always been an all-or-nothing hitter, oftentimes in the space of a single game.

In each of the three games where Perez had three extra-base hits, he smashed two home runs and added a double. The first time he did it was on August 28, 2013, against the Minnesota Twins. He also accomplished the feat on September 23, 2020, against the Cardinals. And now June 17, 2025. The Royals needed this one.

What caught my attention beyond the exit velocity and the way Perez completely owned Leiter on the night was the fact that Salvy was swinging the bat with some serious intent. Perez’s average bat speed this season is around 73 mph. His average speed on his swings where he put the ball in play was just south of 78 mph.

Perez added 32 points to his slugging percentage on Monday. He also bumped his wRC+ 10 points. His current line of .240/.279/.395 with wRC+ of 82 still isn’t good enough, but he’s certainly trending in the right direction. In the 14 games this month, he’s hitting .283/.321/.424, good for a 109 wRC+. That’s more like it.

This was one of the rare games this season where both Perez and Witt combined to power the offense. Witt added a double and a home run of his own. If the Royals are going to get out of the offensive doldrums, they’re going to need both of those guys to produce.

We’re over 1,000 words into today’s entry and still no mention of Seth Lugo. That in no way diminishes the fact that he shoved on Tuesday. It was one of his best starts of the season. He mixed nine pitches, consistently flummoxing Texas hitters. Lugo recorded 14 swings and misses en route to a season-high nine strikeouts over six innings of work. The only run he allowed on the night was the result of a bad hop double off the bat of Corey Seager.

It was a pitching masterclass from Lugo. Again, something the Royals desperately needed from their veteran.

But this was the captain’s night. Perez put the boys on his back and carried them over the finish line.

One win in Texas doesn’t erase the stink the Royals left behind at Kauffman after their winless six-game homestand last week, but it sure helps. For one night, it was 2024 all over again.