It quickly became a different morning.
I turned on the television to get the weather and found a baseball game, the season opener in Australia, in fact, between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Arizona Diamondbacks. I turned it on just in time to see Oliver Perez hit a batter. Nothing different about that.
If Perez isn’t hitting a batter, a batter is hitting him. Oliver might be the player who fooled me more than any other. He had a great season for a bad team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, 10 years ago, and I thought he had a great future.
Perez fooled Omar Minaya, too. Minaya was the New York Mets’ general manager, and he had to decide whether to let Perez leave as a free agent or pay him more than he should. As I said, Perez fooled Minaya, too, but it cost the Mets $36 million and Minaya his job.
So there I was watching Perez hit a batter and Manager Kirk Gibson taking him out of the opener when Ellen, my wife, yelled urgently for me to come quickly. That usually doesn’t happen in our house at 7 o’clock in the morning. But I responded in time to look out the front window and see three deer sauntering along the sidewalk in front of our house.
That is unusual. We don’t live in the country. We don’t live in a rural area. Deer are not an everyday sight in our town, certainly not on our block. Rabbits and squirrels, even an occasional chipmunk, but deer, three deer, not just one? Not in 25 years had we seen that sight.
But that deer family came down our streets and turned onto the walk to our house. Transfixed, we followed their every step, wondering what they would do next.
As I watched them, I wondered how anyone could kill or want to kill these beautiful, majestic animals; why would anyone want to kill them? Oliver Perez, I could understand. His erratic pitching has driven managers to distraction. But he got $36 million from the Mets, and those deer were out of their element, seeking an early-morning meal.
Perez knows where his next meal is coming from. Signed by the Diamondbacks as a free agent three weeks into spring training, he got a two-year contract with salaries totaling $4.25 million. That’s not Masahiro Tanaka money, but it might surprise some people that Perez is still pitching in the major leagues.
Kevin Towers, the Arizona general manager, did not return a call seeking comment on why he signed Perez for two years, but when he signed the pitcher earlier this month he told reporters, “To have a power left-hander now in our bullpen, we think it was something that we needed.”
As for that particular power left-hander, Minaya said, “Kevin has always liked him.”
Indeed, when Towers was the general manager of the San Diego Padres, he signed Perez in 1999 as a 17-year-old amateur in Mexico. However, a month before the end of the left-hander’s second season (2003) with the Padres, Towers traded him to Pittsburgh with Jason Bay for Brian Giles.
It was in 2004, his first full season in the majors, that Perez had what today would be called his breakthrough year, but in his case, the breakthrough – a 2.98 earned run average, 239 strikeouts in 196 innings, a .207 opponents’ batting average — didn’t lead anywhere. In nine subsequent seasons Perez hasn’t come close to matching any of those figures.
Where has he gone? Well, he went to New York at the trading deadline in 2006 and in 2007 had a 15-10 record in 29 starts. He followed that performance with a 10-7 record in a career-high 34 starts in 2008, setting the stage for his big contract.
Before the 2008 season, Perez won a $6.5 million salary in salary arbitration over the Mets’ figure of $4,725,000. As a free agent a year later he accepted a three-year, $36 million contract to remain with the Mets.
“He got hurt the first year of that contract,” Minaya said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “When he came back from the World Baseball Classic he had a knee problem and it affected him. I think he lost his confidence after that. When you have that contract you want to perform and when you don’t perform you lose confidence. We never got a chance to see the real Oliver Perez after that.”
The first two years were disastrous. In 2009 Perez emerged from 14 starts with a 3-4 record and a 6.82 e.r.a. Demonstrating consistency, he had a 6.80 e.r.a. in 2011 but with a 0-5 record in 7 starts and 10 relief appearances. His days as a starter were over. So were his days with the Mets. They released him in spring training 2011, owing him his $12 million salary.
The Washington Nationals signed him to a minor league contract two days after he was released but never summoned him to the majors.
When he resurfaced in the majors in 2012 with Seattle, he was transformed into a relief pitcher, and he responded by posting a 2.12 e.r.a. in 33 relief appearances. A free agent after that season, he stayed in Seattle and had a 3.74 e.r.a. in 61 games.
“Somebody worked with him in Seattle and did a very good job,” Minaya said.
In his second season with the Mariners, though, Perez wore down. In his first 38 appearances, he had a 1.75 e.r.a. and limited opposing batters to a .208 average. In his last 23 games he had a 7.04 e.r.a. and opponents batted .324.
His earlier effort, though, was good enough to create interest in him as a free agent, and the Diamondbacks secured Perez for their bullpen with their offer of a second year. He was in the bullpen in the opening game of the season in Sydney, Australia, when Manager Kirk Gibson summoned him to start the ninth inning with the Dodgers ahead, 3-1.
Perez retired Andre Ethier on a grounder but hit A.J. Ellis on the foot. That’s where I came in, and I went back to thinking about the deer. They didn’t come back, but they got me thinking about our next guests. Every spring we receive a visit from two or three ducks, and we expect them to arrive any day now.