Geraldo Perdomo isn’t sneaking up on anyone anymore. Arizona Diamondbacks shortstop has leveled up since the All-Star break, pairing elite plate discipline with louder contact and real game impact for a D-backs club clawing into the Wild Card picture. He’s walking plenty, striking out less, and turning on pitches he used to just spoil. The result is a second half with power, speed, and on-base skill all spiking at once.
The new damage profile
Perdomo always saw pitches and controlled the zone. This season he’s adding thump. He’s piling up barrels after years of light contact, and that one change explains a lot. The swing decisions are the same. The contact quality is not. Those harder swings are showing up in extra-base hits and timely homers, which is why his post-break line sits among the very best in the league.
Right next to the favorite
If you sort qualified hitters since the break by overall production, you’ll find Shohei Ohtani where you expect him. Perdomo is right there too. That’s how strong this run has been. The stat that blends everything together, wRC+, has him trailing only Ohtani in the second half, with familiar star names stacked behind him.
More than just the bat
Shortstop isn’t a spot where you can hide. Perdomo is giving Arizona clean defense and smart base running on top of the offense. That all-in value shows up on the leaderboards. Check FanGraphs and you’ll see him sitting within a whisker of the NL lead in position-player WAR, in a group that includes Ohtani and Trea Turner.
Context matters for MVP talk
Arizona traded veterans at the deadline and lost key pieces to injuries, yet the D-backs dragged themselves back into the race. That doesn’t happen without Perdomo. He reached base five times in a head-to-head win over San Francisco, a snapshot of how often he’s tilting games in September. When a player lifts a thinned roster and keeps a contender alive, voters take notice.
What an MVP case needs from here
Awards are decided over six months, not six weeks. For Perdomo to make this push stick, he needs to keep the quality of contact where it is and keep stacking impact moments while Arizona stays in the hunt. If the D-backs grab a Wild Card and his two-way value remains near the top of the league, he belongs in every serious NL MVP conversation.
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Bottom line
Perdomo used to be a steady at-bat. Now he’s a problem. The approach stayed. The contact got louder. The defense and base running round it out. That is how a “relative unknown” forces his way into a race that usually belongs to household names.
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