Kansas City Royals catcher Salvador Perez will miss four to six weeks of the season after tearing his MCL in a freak incident.
As reported by Maria Torres of the Kansas City Star, Kansas City Royals All-Star catcher Salvador Perez will miss the first four-to-six weeks of the season with a torn MCL. Perez suffered the injury when he misstepped on his stairs while carrying his suitcase to his bedroom.
“I put in a lot of work to be here,” Perez told Torres. “Be behind home plate tomorrow. I wanted to be there.”
That quote hurts to read. Obviously, this is a tough loss for Kansas City. Expectations were already low for the Royals to begin the year but losing Perez lowers those expectations even more.
The team loses a five-time all-star and four-time Gold Glove winner at the young age of 27 in a year in which they needed him to be special in order to maintain any sort of relevancy.
Losing the All-Star catcher for the first two months of the season will likely lead to a plummet in the rankings so severe that he’ll become most valuable to the organization as a trade chip.
Unfortunately, the injury may lower his trade stock come June and July when the Royals are looking for ways to bolster their farm system and start building the foundation of a team that can contend three-to-five years from now.
Kansas City is also losing Perez’s leadership in the clubhouse. After watching most of their core players from the 2015 World Series Championship team leave as free agents, the Royals were going to be relying heavily on guys like Perez and Mike Moustakas to instill the right attitude in the clubhouse during what is predicted to be a frustrating year.
Having clubhouse leaders that know what it takes to win it all can never be underestimated and the Royals lost one of those leaders this week.
From the perspective of a fan of the game, nobody wants to see a player get injured. Whether it’s your team or your team’s biggest rival losing a star player, you want to see the best athletes out on the field day in and day out.
It’s especially tough to see a player injured in some kind of freak accident rather than on the field where injuries are accepted as part of the risk involved with playing the game.
As baseball fans, all we can do is hope that Perez recovers quickly so that one of the premier names in the game can get back to where he belongs: playing behind the dish in Kansas City.
