{"id":2380064,"date":"2026-04-19T15:41:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-19T15:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2380064"},"modified":"2026-04-19T15:41:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-19T15:41:15","slug":"discord-in-the-clubhouse-salvador-perez-contradicts-manager-over-day-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/discord-in-the-clubhouse-salvador-perez-contradicts-manager-over-day-off\/","title":{"rendered":"Discord in the clubhouse? Salvador Perez contradicts manager over day off"},"content":{"rendered":"

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On Saturday, manager Matt Quatraro gave Salvador Perez a day off for the first time since August of last year, when the team captain missed two games due to illness. Other than that, his most recent day off without an injury or illness concern was June 21, 2025. Perez has struggled to start the year, hitting just .160\/.210\/.307 in 20 games. Quatraro said the day off was to give him a \u201clittle mental breather.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Salvy is famous not just in Kansas City, but around the league as a guy who doesn\u2019t want to sit. Up until now, everyone has taken it in stride as a fun thing to make jokes about.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That perhaps is in a new context now. Salvy contradicted Quatraro, posting on social media, \u201cI don\u2019t need a mental breather.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He even went posted on Instagram, calling the idea he needed a break as \u201cFAKE.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Most of the Royals\u2019 blogosphere spent the entire offseason pontificating that the team needed to play him less or at least shift him from behind the plate into a designated hitter role more often. Over at Inside the Crown, David Lesky noted that Salvy hit much<\/em> better in 2025 on the days after he hadn\u2019t caught the day before. It seemed to be fine for him to DH, play first, or sit entirely, but it was clear he needed less time behind the plate. When the Royals signed Perez to another extension, guaranteeing he\u2019d be under contract through 2027, almost everyone hoped it came with an explanation to the captain that he wasn\u2019t going to be able to catch every game.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And yet, as the Royals have played 21 games this season, Salvy has now played in 20 of them and caught 14 of them. That would be considered the maximum catching load for anyone but Sal. And Sal hasn\u2019t exactly been lighting the world on fire this season.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Batting averages have been down across baseball for a while now, but batting under .200 is still very bad. Having an OBP nearing that line would be enough to get most players benched. It\u2019s not just those numbers that look bad, either.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Baseball Savant<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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His bat speed and hard-hit rates are down. He\u2019s always been known for chasing, but his chase rate is as high as its been since 2022 and 2023, when his numbers cratered for a while. Last year, it was often noted that while he was not an amazing hitter, his expected stats all suggested he was fairly unlucky. But this year, they paint a picture of a guy who would be a liability at the plate even if he was reaching them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So, yeah, he probably deserved\/needed a day off. But what the heck is going on?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Salvador Perez is a guy who allegedly offered to accept a trade in 2023 while the team struggled if the Royals could get significantly better by dealing him. He won the Roberto Clemente Award for exhibiting extraordinary character. He\u2019s been the face of the franchise for more than a decade with his big smile and positive attitude. What do you have to do to upset a guy like that this much?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He\u2019s obviously earned a lot of respect, not just in the Royals clubhouse, but around the entire league. And I just wrote last week about the importance of showing loyalty<\/a> to veteran players. If he were given a day off without any discussion, that certainly wouldn\u2019t seem to be a poor choice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When Quatraro told Anne Rogers that Sal was struggling, that was simply and obviously factually correct. When he said that he was giving Sal a mental break, that was extremely standard and boilerplate language to describe giving a struggling guy a day off. If Sal took exception to it, it seems like the best way to handle that would have been in a private discussion, not a public argument. The only way in which Sal\u2019s reaction to getting a single day off seems reasonable to me is if Quatraro has had a much<\/em> worse handle on the clubhouse culture than we\u2019ve been given any reason to believe. This is the first time there\u2019s ever been any<\/em> kind of public rumbling of discontent, and Quatraro just received a length extension as a show of faith from the front office and ownership.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It does lead me to wonder if the reason Sal continues to bat fourth even as it\u2019s obvious to just about anyone that the team would be best served by him batting lower in the order is less about Quatraro being unwilling to make the move, as perhaps he has been afraid to upset the captain with such a demotion. But that would be an indictment of everyone involved.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Adding an extra wrinkle to all of this is the addition of Elias D\u00edaz to the active roster, a transaction that was announced today.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Royals were very clear entering the season that they didn\u2019t think they needed a third catcher on the roster. Now, a day after giving Salvador Perez a day off, they add that third catcher? It could be a belief that Carter Jensen needs to play less often – he\u2019s out of the lineup in favor of D\u00edaz – but the timing is unfortunate, if so.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There is absolutely no way to know who is at fault in this situation, or if anyone is at fault, or if it is some combination of faults. But it\u2019s an unfortunate distraction at a time when the team can seemingly least afford them as they try to find their way out of an early-season swoon that is rapidly exiting the realm of something that can be easily shaken off. Hopefully, everything is resolved quickly and amicably and the team can get back to winning, or we could all be in for a very, very long 2026 season.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.royalsreview.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Saturday, manager Matt Quatraro gave Salvador Perez a day off for the first time since August of last year, when the team captain missed two games due to illness. Other than that, his most recent day off without an injury or illness concern was June 21, 2025. Perez has struggled to start the year, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2380065,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[445712,340874],"class_list":["post-2380064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty","tag-kansas-city-royals-analysis","tag-royals-editorials-reactions"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Discord-in-the-clubhouse-Salvador-Perez-contradicts-manager-over-day.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2380064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2380064"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2380064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2380066,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2380064\/revisions\/2380066"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2380065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2380064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2380064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2380064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}