The Roller-coaster
1985 was a year in which the bottom essentially fell out.
Baseball is a hard sport. There’s a lot involving skills, but it’s also about preparation, mental readiness, and the ability to ignore your past when it doesn’t help your future.
There are positions on the field in which players are normally thought of as power contributors. Perry played two of these: left field and first base. In 1985, though, his power and his hitting – never the best parts of his game anyway – completely betrayed him.
- April: no extra base hits, 2 RBI… and only 4 hits period
- May: 3 doubles, 1 homer, 3 RBI.
- June: no extra base hits, 1 RBI… only 3 hits at all
- July: 1 single… 1 RBI… both on July 31.
The RBI droughts were so notable that the TBS broadcasters were keeping track… and noting it virtually every day.
His next RBI came on August 26th before he started to rally a bit over the last 3-4 weeks of the season. It seems a quirk of math that he managed to hit .214 for the year… especially after starting with a .125 clip in April and an RBI-less streak from June 15-July 30 (and only 1 until Aug 26).
If you’re wondering how Perry even kept his job with all that going on, it’s because the Atlanta Braves opted to fire their manager instead. Torre had already been relieved of his duties after the ’84 season, but replacement Eddie Haas didn’t do any better (50-71)… nor did his interim replacement Bobby Wine (16-25).
But changes did eventually trickle down, and Perry was sent back to AAA for most of 1986… though it also produced the best numbers of his entire professional career: a .924 OPS and .326 batting average.
That hot streak continued as he returned to the majors for twice – late May through mid June and from mid-September to the end of the year), hitting .271 and driving in 11 runs… nearly as many as he’d provided during all of 1985 (13).
Keep it Rolling
Whatever Perry figured out in 1986 continued in 1987 and ’88. In fact, he was so good for the first half of 1988 (.337/.380/.443/.823) that he made the All-Star game.
Again, excellent hitting, though still not a great power threat.
After that notable event? A seventy point drop in his batting average to .265. for the back half of the year. Over the full season, that still made Perry a .300 hitter at the major league level, though the Braves were clearly starting to scratch their heads about him.
In 1988, though, batting .300 was still good enough to rank him 5th in the NL batting chase (Tony Gwynn won that year… that’s no surprise, but his .313 was notable in that it was the lowest mark for a batting champ in the history of the NL).
Perry – a left-handed hitter – was definitely better against right-handed pitching, though a .270 clip against lefties that year still wasn’t terrible. All of that together got him yet another year in Atlanta.
1989 saw Atlanta experimenting with a number of solutions at first base – 9 different players saw time there, though Perry was still getting the plurality of innings. But nothing really worked there, and with Lonnie Smith having a career year in left field, 1st was Perry’s only position option.
Perry hit .252… and then the Braves let him go.