Royals Extend Salvador Perez Into 2027

Just think how wrong it would’ve felt. Two years from now, watching Salvador Perez, who signed with the Royals as a 16-year-old in 2006, squatting behind the plate in Miami blue. Salvador Perez, who put the “everyday” in “Kansas City Royals everyday catcher” starting in 2012, launching dingers through the thin mountain air in Rockies purple. It’s enough to make you cry, but luckily, this dystopian future has been avoided. According to Anne Rogers of MLB.com, the 35-year-old backstop has signed an two-year extension that will keep in him in Royals Blue through the 2027 season. It’s better this way. The deal is for $25 million, with some deferrals and a $7 million signing bonus.

To be clear, Perez wasn’t at risk of leaving anytime soon. His previous four-year, $82 million deal that started in 2022 had a $13.5 million option for 2026, and general manager J.J. Picollo told reporters in September that the catcher would be returning one way or another. Anthony Franco of MLB Trade Rumors explained the reasons for the deal: “While the specific salary structure and deferrals have yet to be reported, it stands to reason [the Royals will] negotiate a lower ’26 salary than the option value while giving Perez the security of the second guaranteed year.” So it’s the classic extension trade-off. The Royals get a discount and Perez gets an extra year of job security. It also allows him to avoid free agency amid whatever shenanigans occur when the collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2026 season.

That extra year is a big one in terms of increasing the likelihood that Perez retires as a lifelong Royal. One day in the not-too-distant future, we’ll endure a knock-down-drag-out battle about Perez’s worthiness for enshrinement in the Hall of Fame, and we’ll be lucky to live through it. In the meantime, he’s improved his shot at wading into the fray wielding single-team bona fides. As for why the Royals would feel the need to get out in front of things and lock down the age-37 season of a catcher who has exceeded 0.8 WAR just once in the past four years, well, it makes more sense than you think.

Let’s start with the reasons to be skeptical and then we’ll end with the reasons the move makes sense. In terms of pure power, Perez is one of the greatest catchers of all time. His 303 career home runs rank eighth on the all-time catchers list right now, and he looks likely to vault into fifth place in 2026. He needs just 22 homers to do so, and the last time he didn’t hit at least 20 home runs in a season was 2014 (aside from 2020, when his 11 translated to 26 over a full season). He launched 30 in 2025, his highest total since 2021, when he set the now-broken single-season catcher record with 48. Could he blast another 30 home runs? Of course he could. He hits the ball as hard as ever. In fact, he just hit the hardest ball of his entire career this May and ran his highest 90th-percentile exit velocity since 2021. But his overall offensive profile is a different story.

Thanks to one of the highest chase rates the game has ever seen, Perez has offset nearly all of that power with disastrously low walk rates and on-base percentages. Among the 717 players in our database with at least 6,000 career PAs, his 3.9% walk rate ranks 711th and his on-base percentage ranks 694th. As a result, he owns a career 103 wRC+. The 2025 season provided a great example of his combination of strengths and weaknesses. He put up the lowest BABIP of his career and his third-highest xwOBA since Statcast started measuring the stat in 2015, which balanced out to a 95 wRC+. Perez has run a DRC+ of at least 100 in every season but one stretching back to 2017, but as one of the slowest and least patient players in the game, he’s always going to be susceptible to the BABIP bug. Steamer sees him posting a 100 wRC+ next year, which presumably means it sees him a bit below that the following year. He could easily put up anything from the 87 wRC+ he ran in 2023 to the 117 he had in 2024. Then again, if the aging curve drops his contact rate even further, watch out. Things could get really ugly really fast.

Perez led baseball in games caught three times and exceeded 100 games in six different seasons, but that was a different time. He has caught just over 90 games in each of the past three seasons, splitting the rest of his time between first base and designated hitter. His defense has graded out poorly at catcher and average at first. It goes without saying that any competitive team should want more than a league-average bat from both first base and DH, especially when much of that value is frittered away because of some of the worst baserunning value in the game. So that’s all the bad stuff.

Now we end on the high note. Why should the Royals want Perez around for the 2027 season? There’s all of the legacy-burnishing stuff that we mentioned earlier. There’s the fact that regardless of the defensive woes, it’s hard to turn up your nose at a guy who’s got a good chance at blasting 30 homers out of Kauffman Stadium, especially when you’ve got an iffy DH situation. Lastly, we’ve got the fact that Perez is a leader, a fan favorite, and a Robert Clemente Award winner, possessing the kind of intangibles that have caused the Royals to overlook mediocre WAR totals for years now. All those skills are relevant because it’s starting to look like Perez could be the bridge to the next era of Kansas City catching.

The Royals traded backup catcher Freddy Fermin to San Diego at the deadline, and they did so at least in part because Carter Jensen started to make him look superfluous. Jensen was the team’s third-round pick in 2021, a local kid out of Park Hill Senior High School in Kansas City. He ran a 130 wRC+ between High-A and Double-A in 2024, then followed it up with a 136 between Double-A and Triple-A in 2025. The Royals called him up in September, and over 18 games, he had a 159 wRC+ thanks to monster exit velocity numbers that didn’t look all that different from the ones he posted in a larger sample at Triple-A.

It seems safe to assume that Jensen isn’t going to keep putting up Cal Raleigh numbers next year. Steamer projects him for a 104 wRC+. Moreover, when Eric Longenhagen ranked Jensen second in the organization behind Jac Caglianone back in May, he wrote that the 22-year-old still had a lot to figure out, both at the plate and behind it: “The physical tools are the reason to stay on Jensen even as he trudges the long development path of a high school catcher.” But given his early success and the Fermin trade, it certainly looks like the Royals are ready to push Jensen along the path at a faster pace. It’s hard to imagine a better guide over the next two years than Perez. He’s Kansas City’s last link to the 2015 championship team and one of the most venerated veterans in the game. His spot in franchise history is already secure, and there’s no way of knowing how long he plans on catching, but helping to groom the next franchise catcher could be a cherry on top of an already remarkable career.