Atlanta Braves Morning Chop: the strange career of Gerald Perry
After Atlanta
The Royals picked up Perry for the 1990 season. He played in 133 games for them, batting .254 for an 80-81 club whose General Manager happened to be John Schuerholz… who resigned after that season to move South.
In 1991, the Cardinals picked up Perry and gave him parts of 5 seasons as a player with a diminishing role through 1995, appearing in 109, 87, 96, 60, and 65 games.
His hitting continued to be a mystery, with averages of .240, .238, .337, .325, and .165.
Ah, but it wasn’t much of a mystery to St. Louis as he was used almost exclusively against right-handers from 1992 onward. Once that platoon experiment fell flat in 1995, Perry was done (plus, but that time they also had Ron Gant and John Mabry to more ably fill Perry’s positions).
Gerald Perry’s final game in the majors came on August 24, 1995 – a couple of months short of his 35th birthday.
An Improbable Journey
It’s almost hard to believe that a position player could gain over 10 years of service with stats like Perry had overall: -0.1 WAR as measured by baseball-reference; 0.5 by fangraphs.
He was just good enough in multiple years to continue to get lease renewals, but then lapsed back into the role of an occasional singles hitter who couldn’t solve left-handed pitching.
There have been something over 19,500 major league players as mapped by baseball-reference (Austin Riley was #19,504).
There have been just 38 hitters over these 140+ years of MLB play that have a negative bWAR while still managing to hang around for 1,000 games.
Gerald Perry has the 16th most games played on that list.
Other names you might recognize: Wes Helms (12th), Yuniesky Betancourt (18th), Rafael Belliard (19th), Greg Norton (25th), Juan Castro (26th), Cito Gaston (33rd).
I was going to suggest that it might be difficult for a player to do this ‘feat’ in this era of play… except that 8 players on the list finished up their careers since 2000.
It seems that role players still have a … role… in this game.
Still – in a sport with a lot of ups and downs, Gerald Perry managed to carve himself a niche in the history of a couple of teams over a 13 year period… and he’s been working occasionally as a coach in the years since.
dark. Next. Moose ... and Squirrel?
He’s an oddity, no doubt – but good on him for the effort to stick with it for as long as he did.