Mets' Francisco Alvarez amid offensive struggles: 'I don't feel powerful'
Mets catcher Francisco Alvarez returns to the dugout after striking out swinging to end the fifth inning against the Athletics in an MLB game at Citi Field on Aug. 13. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
SAN DIEGO — Francisco Alvarez is a 5-10, 233-pound tank of a slugger with a problem: He isn’t hitting for very much power.
He finished Saturday with a .382 slugging percentage, the lowest of any hitter on the Mets’ roster. His walk-off home run Monday against the Orioles proved not to be the spark the team had hoped it would be; in the five games since, he went 0-for-16 with seven strikeouts.
Still only 22 years old and in his second season as a major-league regular, Alvarez is — as manager Carlos Mendoza phrased it — “going through it.”
This season has proved to be the “complete opposite,” Alvarez said, of what he expected at the beginning.
“I don’t feel powerful,” he said.
That is a foreign concept for Alvarez, who shot through the minor leagues and mashed 25 homers as a rookie in 2023. This year, he has only six in about a half-season worth of action.
The Mets insist that Alvarez — who tends to take a beating as a catcher — is healthy. He did miss seven weeks because of a thumb ligament tear that required surgery. Hitting coach Eric Chavez said lingering effects of that injury might have impacted him at some point but that those have “never been one of the main, big issues of what’s going on.”
Instead, Chavez said, the problem stems from Alvarez’s mentality at the plate and mixed messages that might confuse him. Chavez referenced “outside noise” and voices — he said he doesn’t know who — that encouraged Alvarez to chase home runs to leftfield, the opposite of the more well-rounded approach that led to his success upon returning in June.
“I’ve been trying to tell him for the past couple of weeks: He’s a high-performance sports car,” Chavez said. “He needs to learn how to drive the sports car in second gear. Because he’s got fourth gear, fifth gear and it goes. He just needs to learn how to pump the brakes a little bit and control all that horsepower.
“I told him: Listen, you hit 25 home runs last year. That’s great. I looked at your year and I don’t think it was very good. There’s a lot of areas you could get better at.”
Even for the strongest of hitters, hitting is about more than the long ball.
“Everybody just wants to just jump into home runs,” Chavez said. “We’ve seen it across the league. We promote home runs. Batting average doesn’t get talked about.
“I said [to Alvarez], in a couple of years, you will be the best-hitting catcher in the league. But you gotta learn how to hit first. Let’s get your hit tool down and the power will come.
“It’s there. The power is in the bag. You gotta make sure that the hit tool and the consistency is there.”
Alvarez’s struggles have deepened since the All-Star break. In those five weeks, he has a .149/.204/.241 slash line.
In the past three, those numbers are even worse: .097/.200/.194.
The underlying numbers are ugly, too. Overall this year, he is hitting balls not as hard and hitting way more on the ground relative to last season. He has struggled against breaking balls in particular.
“If I had the answer, I could go do it,” Alvarez said. “I’m working with the hitting coaches right now, I’m working with Chavey, with Jeremy [Barnes, the Mets’ other hitting coach], who take a lot of time working on my swing, my stance, feeling a little more powerful. We’re working every day. We come here to work every day.
“It’s not fun, but I have to have more discipline, I have to get better, I have to learn more. I can go through it so it feels like nothing that crazy.”
Mendoza said Alvarez is “staying positive” and “still working.”
“He’s our guy,” Mendoza said. “It’s part of the development as a young player. He’s going to be all right.”
Chavez said: “Right now, he’s in a good head space, working on the right stuff. Now he needs the feedback of feeling success again.”
Tim Healey is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. Born on Long Island and raised in Connecticut, Tim has previously worked for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Boston Globe and MLB.com. He is also the author of “Hometown Hardball,” a book about minor league baseball in the northeast.
