Salvador Perez is back where he wants to be: Playing October baseball in Kansas City

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Before every game, Salvador Perez, the Kansas City Royals’ 34-year-old catcher, lathers his entire body with an icy balm to wake up his muscles. “Knee, shoulder, groin,” he said. “Everywhere.” He tapes up his body parts — different each night, depending on what’s sore — slides neoprene sleeves onto his thighs, and gets ready for another night in baseball’s most unforgiving job.

“I’m not 25 anymore,” Perez said this week.

That was a magical age. It was 2015. The Royals won their first World Series in 30 years, a series in which Perez captured MVP honors after hitting .364. He loved that postseason — the pressure, the pageantry, the stakes, all of it — and fantasized about great October performances to come.

Only a week ago did the Royals finally return to the playoffs. Eight awful seasons Perez waited, and now he’s back at Kauffman Stadium to conjure more magic, this time in a pivotal Game 3 of their American League Division Series against the New York Yankees. Of all the fantastic consequences of Kansas City’s baseball renaissance this year — the reignition from a fan base that had been dulled by losing, the emergence of Bobby Witt Jr. as a superstar, a turnaround from a 56-106 record to 86-76 — the one that satisfies veteran employees in the organization more than any is that Perez’s postseason drought ending.

It surprised none of them that Perez found himself in the middle of the Royals’ series-tying triumph Monday night at Yankee Stadium. Even at 34, approaching 1,300 career games as a catcher, he remains among the finest at the position. He is Kansas City’s captain, its cleanup hitter and, in Game 2, author of a home run that ensured Yankees starter Carlos Rodon’s tongue remained in his mouth after a first-inning celebratory wag.

Perez has made a career of damaging pitchers’ good times. He made his ninth All-Star team this season, hit 27 home runs, drove in 104 runs and managed to play 158 games, 91 of them at catcher. He spent the winter changing his catching style to frame pitches better and has found great success in reinventing himself. He is approaching 11,000 innings caught and 300 home runs hit, the type of gaudy numbers that are the domain of those inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. And two years ago, when Matt Quatraro was named manager, Perez was the first player he reached out to. He wanted to listen to what Perez thought about the Royals’ present and future.

“A huge goal of ours,” Quatraro said, “was to return him back to where we feel like he rightfully belongs in the game.”

That’s October. “This is what he lives for,” said Cole Ragans, the winning pitcher in Game 2 of the ALDS. Ragans learned this over the past year, when he grew into an ace under Perez’s tutelage. Even when Perez’ body barks at him and tells him men in their mid-30s weren’t built to catch regularly in the big leagues, he pushes through the physical challenges because he craves the mental ones.

“I love to think about the game,” Perez said. ” I want to be in charge. I tell these guys, give me all the pressure. I’ve got it. I want to think fastball, slider, curveball, how we got him out the last at-bat, what we do now, what he’s looking for. That’s why I love catching so much.”

For years, teams reached out to Royals general manager Dayton Moore inquiring about a trade. The Royals couldn’t move Perez. He is Salvy, progenitor of the Salvy Splash, owner of the No. 13, which someday will be retired. But at the end of last season, Royals GM J.J. Picollo asked Perez if he had any desire to play elsewhere. Picollo believed the Royals were close to turning a corner, and owner John Sherman pledged to spend money, but he did not want to keep Perez if Perez didn’t believe in Kansas City’s future.

“I talked to J.J. last year about that when we lost a lot of games,” Perez said. “A bunch of teams wanted me, but I don’t want to go. This is my second home.”

He means it — after 13 years in Kansas City, Perez is the guy who will see a whiffle ball game going on in a neighborhood and stop to play a game with the kids. Perez gets reciprocal love from the city that remembers his walk-off hit in the 2014 AL wild-card game like it was yesterday and will pack Kauffman Stadium in hopes that the Royals can do what they did the last time they faced the Yankees in the postseason, in 1980: Win a five-game series.

When asked Tuesday about Yankees third baseman Jazz Chisholm’s comments after the Royals’ 4-2 victory in Game 2 — “They got lucky” — Perez abandoned his happy-go-lucky norm, turned terse and declined to say anything. In October, there’s no time for nonsense. It’s time to go home — after 17 days on the road to finish their season and wipe out Baltimore in the wild-card round, Perez was forced to do his own laundry in the hotel for the first time in his life — and show his teammates what postseason games are like s at Kauffman Stadium.

“‘How’s it going to look?'” Perez said they’ve asked him. “‘How’s it going to be? How loud is it going to be?’ We have the best fans ever. Even in the bad moments, they were there for us.”

They’ll be there Wednesday and Thursday. Playoff games across the parking lot at Arrowhead Stadium are old hat, but at the K? They’re special, and they wouldn’t feel quite right without Salvador Perez, the heart of his team. So he’ll arrive early, go through his routine, prepare his body, jog onto the field at 7:06 p.m. and squat in his second home, his city, the only place he wants to be.