Eury Perez lights up the radar gun in electric spring training debut

It’s never a good idea to overreact to spring training results, especially spring training results in late February. Pitchers are more concerned with building arm strength and trying out new pitch grips than they are with actually getting outs, batters are working on swing tweaks and getting used to live pitching again, and the whole thing is best understood as practice that has a box score attached to it for some reason. Amid all those variables, it’s nearly impossible to separate the signal from the noise; baseball history is littered with spring breakouts that didn’t mean much of anything once the regular season arrived.

Okay, now forget I said all that and gawk with me at what Marlins righty Eury Perez did during his first spring training start on Monday afternoon:

Expectations this year were already high for the 20-year-old righty after he posted a 3.15 ERA with 108 strikeouts in 91.1 innings as a rookie last season. He wasn’t able to make much of an impact down the stretch as the Marlins played it very safe with his innings, but he showed exactly why he was among the top pitching prospects in baseball and left everyone wondering just what he could do over a full season once he has his feet under him in the Majors.

And if this is a preview, hoo boy. Perez allowed one run on three hits with three strikeouts over 1.2 innings against a Cardinals lineup that included names like Paul Goldschmidt, Nolan Arenado, Nolan Gorman and Jordan Walker. Alas, the game wasn’t televised, so we can’t show you what that pure gas looked like, but the numbers themselves jump off the page — Perez averaged 98 with his heater, a full half-tick up from his rookie season in 2023.

Even more interestingly, Perez seems to be trying out a new curveball, one that’s much slower and comes with substantially more movement than last year’s version.

Perez’s curve was very good last year — 87th percentile in xwOBA, 99th percentile in whiff rate — but it was also easily the secondary pitch that he had the least command of, and it makes sense that he might want to create a more distinct third offering considering that he already has a high-80s slider at his disposal.

Perez is currently going off the board just inside the top 100 in regular redraft leagues, a price that could look shockingly low in a few months’ time. There’s concern about Perez’s workload given that he was sent down to the Minors and put on the shelf for weeks at a time, but the Marlins can’t hold him down much longer. Plus, he still managed to throw 128 innings between the Majors and Minors last season; if you project the sort of 30- or 40-inning jump we’ve seen from second-year pitchers in recent years, that gets him to 160 or 170 — more than good enough considering how few starters sniff 200 frames these days. And if he does in fact get up near 170, an SP1 finish is very much in play given the sheer ridiculousness of his stuff. Yes, he had a bit of a home run problem last year, and yes, his secondary command put undue stress on his fastball at times (which likely contributed to said home run problem). But Perez was dominating big-league lineups as a teenager, and guys with that sort of track record become great pros more often than not. Perez is as good a bet as anyone to make improvements as he goes, and this could be the last time he’s a mid-round fantasy pick for a decade.