Hernan Perez’s bat is showing some of its trademark pop early in Cactus League play. In his first five games he collected four extra base hits, including three home runs. It was a nice first step as he works to bounce back from a disappointing 2018 season, where he posted his lowest batting average (.253) and on-base plus slugging (.676) as a Brewer, backsliding into a part-time role as the Brewers added players that ate up his playing time.
It turns out that Perez’s struggles might have had a medical explanation: Perez had offseason surgery to remove a bone chip in his left wrist, an ailment he claims he played through for much of the season. Perez did not specify exactly when the wrist started bothering him, but it’s telling that he more or less stopped hitting for power in August: In his final 40 appearances from August 5 through the end of the regular season he batted .241 with a .284 on-base percentage and .277 slugging. Seventeen of his 20 hits in that stretch were singles, and none were home runs.
Perez’s offensive game has always been somewhat secondary to the value he provides by being a capable defender at multiple positions. FanGraphs estimates he’s had a net positive value for the Brewers over his tenure in Milwaukee despite being worth about 30 runs less than a replacement-caliber player at the plate since the start of the 2015 season. Perez likely negated a fair amount of his potential value in 2018, however, by playing hurt.
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In recent years major league teams have taken major strides in recognizing that a healthy, well-rested player is often significantly more productive and valuable than a player who plays every single game. From 2003-13 an average MLB season saw 14 players appear in 160 or more games, effectively appearing in every one of their team's contests. Since 2014 that average is down to 7.8 players per season. Even the game’s elite workhorses are getting more days off than they used to.
Consider, for a moment, the case of Christian Yelich. The Brewers had made a major investment in Yelich and had gotten just a couple of weeks of return on it when he injured his oblique in April of 2018. There had to be some temptation for Yelich to try to play through the injury and avoid going on the shelf, but the Brewers made the prudent decision and realized that going without their new star for a brief period of time was better than letting an injury hamper his performance all season. Yelich missed 12 games, returned on April 18 and batted .323/.402/.599 the rest of the way en route to the National League MVP Award.
Missing some time in 2018 to get his wrist taken care of might not have made Perez an MVP candidate upon his return, but it might have left him better positioned to contribute at the plate down the stretch. In a best-case scenario, it might even have reduced the Brewers’ need to raid their farm system to acquire bench help for the season’s final months.
The Brewers are, of course, not the only organization that deals with situations like this. Giants shortstop and 2018 All Star Brandon Crawford also recently detailed how attempts to play through injury derailed the second half of his season.
“Looking back at it, I definitely should have taken like ten days off in the middle of the season,” Crawford told radio station KNBR. “We were right in the middle of it, trying to win every game and trying to help the team, but I probably wasn’t helping the team a whole lot, so I should have just taken those days off.”
Words like “tough” and “gamer” are often used to describe players who play at less than full health in an effort to help their teams win. In the end, however, both player and team would often stand to benefit if those same players took a day, a week or even a month off to reposition themselves to play at full strength.
