Perez was raised during the 1940s and '50s in one of Harlem's multiethnic neighborhoods, where baseball transcended race and ethnicity. His love and understanding of the game began with stickball in the streets around 125th and Amsterdam. It deepened in the local playgrounds and at Yankee Stadium, where as a child he imagined playing alongside his pin-striped hero, Mickey Mantle.
Although Perez aspired to become a professional baseball player, he realized by age 16 that his talents lay in another passion - drawing. After relocating to Philadelphia in 1958, he attended the Philadelphia College of Art, where he studied European landscape romanticism, classical realism, and expressionism - the same styles American artists had used to portray baseball players on tobacco cards and magazine covers at the turn of the 20th century.
Introduced to the possibility of baseball as subject matter by American artists such as Thomas Eakins, William Morris Hunt, and Norman Rockwell, Perez decided to wed his twin passions, baseball and art. He began experimenting with baseball portraiture and figurative painting. In the process, he established a unique artistic genre that gave voice to the American national character, with its emphasis on youth and dreams, fame and success, and hard work and devotion.
Perez's baseball art reflects the influences of such masters as John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn, Joaquin Sorolla, and Diego Velazquez. It provides an enduring record of ballplayers' physical features and demeanors, as well as their professional achievements.
