Geraldo Perdomo Is Making the Ultimate Sacrifice

I learned a new fact while watching the Yankees-Blue Jays game on Sunday, and I’d like to share it with you: YES Network play-by-play man Michael Kay mentioned that Austin Wells is tied for the league lead in sacrifice flies with Geraldo Perdomo.

I don’t want to disabuse anyone of the notion that FanGraphs writers are all-seeing brains-in-jars, but I had no idea this was the case. Even considering the vast bigness of my highly learned noggin, I can’t say that sacrifice flies have ever been a stat I cared much about tracking. I’m sure there’s some connection (positive or negative, I cannot say) between the quality of a hitter and the number of sac flies he produces, but mostly sacrifice flies seem to be more a function of opportunity than skill. Not least because I don’t think anyone sets out to hit a sacrifice fly as such; if you’re putting the ball in the air with a runner on third and less than two outs, you’d probably rather hit a home run or a double. A sac fly is a fallback position.

But this fun fact about the major league sac fly leaderboard struck me, because in my mind, Perdomo isn’t the sac fly guy, he’s the sac bunt guy.

During the 2023 postseason, Perdomo bunted up a storm. In just 63 postseason plate appearances that year, Perdomo laid down five sacrifices and a bunt single, accounting for nearly a quarter of all postseason bunts that year. Perdomo’s Brad Williams kickball act was a startling outlier, even at the time, but it didn’t come entirely without warning. Perdomo tied for the league lead in sacrifice hits in 2022 with 12, then laid down another 14 to lead the majors outright in 2023.

A lot has happened since then. Occasionally a young player will follow what I might describe as the Jose Altuve career path. They come up to the majors at a very young age, get into the lineup, and despite indifferent-to-bad offensive production, they stay there. If you play good defense at a premium position, steal a few bases, and make your coworkers laugh, you don’t have to hit much to stay on the roster.

It worked for Altuve, and for José Ramírez. You might not remember this, but as a 21-year-old rookie shortstop, Ramírez hit just .262/.300/.346, and led the league with 13 sacrifice bunts in just 68 games.

What those two guys did, and now Perdomo, is they learned how to hit. All of them had some kind of elite underlying hitting skill (bat control, plate discipline, etc.), but didn’t figure out how to translate it into elite production until they’d been in the majors a couple years.

And so Perdomo has become one of those guys I write about a lot. I checked in on him in May, when he was wrecking house, and the 25-year-old has not relented as the year has worn on. With about three weeks to go in the season, Perdomo is rocking a .284/.382/.447 slash line, good for a 131 wRC+. His 17 home runs in 2025 are more than he hit in his first three major league seasons put together, and when you toss in 24 stolen bases and average-or-better shortstop defense, he’s already at 5.7 WAR on the season.

It turns out that now that Perdomo is one of Arizona’s better hitters, manager Torey Lovullo isn’t quite so keen on him giving away outs. Perdomo has still laid down five sac bunts this year, which is more than the zero laid down by Bobby Witt Jr., who has a lower wRC+ than Perdomo. (Imagine saying that two years ago.) But it’s way fewer than 14.

Baseball is a global game in every way that matters. Over the past 150 years, it’s been embraced by countless millions of every race and creed, in every corner of the globe. To say it has an all-encompassing culture is just not true. But in our neck of the woods, in cutthroat capitalist America, baseball can get pretty bleak.

Like, “Fail seven times out of 10 and you’re a Hall of Famer” just teaches us that life is suffering. And the fact that there are two distinct, unrelated statistical categories with “sacrifice” in the name is almost Calvinist.

And yet Perdomo, one of the most cheerful personalities in the league, has now led the majors in both. Assuming Wells doesn’t take sole possession of the lead in sac flies between now and the end of the season, which will be fun to keep track of. It’s like the home run chase for total nerds.

Does that make Perdomo the most sacrificial player in the game, if not all time?

It depends on how you look at it. What I do know is that it’s rare for a player to excel (sure, let’s go with that word) in both categories. Players who lay down a lot of sacrifice bunts tend to be bat control guys without a lot of power. Scrappy middle infielders. Guys who would’ve hit second in the 1950s.

There’s not really a hard-and-fast rule for league leaders in sacrifice flies, but you do need to get the ball in the air with a decent amount of power. But not too much power, because that’s how you end up leading the league in home runs, and not sac flies. Last year’s league leaders were Vinnie Pasquantino and pre-homer binge Eugenio Suárez. Will Smith has been up there a couple times. Adam Duvall, Jesús Aguilar, Charlie Blackmon… you know warning track power when you see it.

Anyway, there’s not too much overlap. Sacrifice flies have been a part of the rulebook since 1954; four players have led either league in both sacrifice hits and sacrifice flies in a full season: Johnny Temple, Roberto Alomar, Francisco Lindor, and Elvis Andrus. Temple is the only one to lead the entire major leagues in both categories, executing 17 successful sac bunts in 1958, and driving in 13 runs with sac flies the very next year. That’s what Perdomo is chasing.

Sacrifice flies are the harder category in which to post big numbers. In the very first year of the sac fly era, 1954, Gil Hodges ripped off 19 of them, a figure nobody has matched since. Only five other hitters in the past 70 years have produced more than 15 sac flies in a season.

But greater love hath no man than this, to lay down a bunt for his friend. The single-season AL/NL record is 67, set by Ray Chapman in 1917. Chapman, who’s most famous now for being major league baseball’s only on-field fatality, was a prolific bunter. In just eight and a half major league seasons, Chapman laid down some 334 sacrifice hits, including five seasons of 40 or more.

Come the live ball era, sac bunts waned in popularity, though big individual seasons popped up through the early 21st century. Bert Campaneris laid down 40 sacrifice hits in 1977, the highest total since 1954. In the 2000s, there have been seven seasons of 20 or more sacrifice hits, including three in 2004 alone. Roy Oswalt and Javier Vázquez each hit the 20-sac bunt mark as pitchers, which is mighty impressive.

But then the nerds came along and convinced everyone that it’s usually unwise to trade an out for a base. Perdomo has the highest total of sacrifice hits in a season since 2015 with those 14 in 2023, though Kyle Isbel and Luis Arraez are just one and two bunts off that mark, respectively, with plenty of season to go.

Arraez leads the league in total sacrifices (hits and flies combined) with 18, followed by Isbel and Perdomo with 16 apiece, then Pete Crow-Armstrong and Jose Herrera (who’s tallied 14 in just 204 plate appearances). But ballplayers just don’t sacrifice like they used to:

Lindor in 2016, Perdomo in 2023, and Arraez this year are tied for the most combined sacrifices in the past decade, and they trail the selfless Gutierrez by double digits. The cool kids are going the entire year without a sac bunt or a sac fly. Here are the 21st-century seasons with the most plate appearances without a sacrifice of either flavor:

Ironically, Goldschmidt tied for the NL lead in sacrifice flies in 2012, and Andrus was a prolific sacrificer. He led the AL in sac bunts three times in his first five seasons, then led the AL in sac flies (albeit without a sac bunt) in 2019. Only five players who debuted in 2000 or later have 50 or more career sacrifice hits and 50 or more career sacrifice flies; Andrus is one of them.

And yet, in 2022? Bupkis. Sacrifice is a fickle business; it takes a special player, like Perdomo, to master it entirely.