Mets need to keep Francisco Alvarez around
Francisco Alvarez #4 of the Mets celebrates his tenth inning RBI single against the Cleveland Guardians at Citi Field on Friday, May 19, 2023. Credit: Jim McIsaac
This isn’t the Francisco Alvarez we were told about.
Sure, he was a top international rookie at just 16, with a mature swing and undeniable power that made scouts take notice. And there’s no doubt he’s blown through every level of the minor leagues with the facility and aptitude that made his eventual spot with the Mets feel inevitable.
But even when he made his debut in a handful of games last year, there always seemed to be a caveat.
Francisco Alvarez hits home runs . . . but boy, are the strikeouts going to be a problem. Francisco Alvarez is the best catching prospect since Adley Rutschman . . . but his defense might be a liability. Can he block? Can he frame? Is he athletic? Can he handle major-league pitching?
Spoiler alert. The answers are: Yes, yes, mostly yes, and, increasingly, yes.
Which is why some of the talk about the Mets’ catching situation feels a little off.
With Gary Sanchez’s promotion, Tomas Nido on the mend from dry-eye syndrome and Omar Narvaez set to begin a rehab assignment next week, the Mets potentially are looking at having four viable catchers, only one with options. That, of course, is Alvarez.
To which we say, keep those options. Preserve them for posterity. Donate them to charity. Make them into little origami cranes (for the purpose of this column, options are physical objects and apparently made of paper).
If Alvarez sustains this level of play and especially if he keeps improving — something he’s done consistently since the rough first few weeks of his major-league tenure — the Mets are not made better by sending him down. The Mets are made better in the long run by keeping him as their starting catcher.
After dropping to a .200 average on May 4, Alvarez is hitting .270 with four home runs, seven RBIs and a 1.048 OPS in 11 games. He hit a tying three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth against the Rays on Wednesday and a tying single against the Guardians on Friday. Alvarez and fellow rookies Brett Baty and Mark Vientos have been key in dragging this team out of the muddy bog that sometimes made them look powerless against supposedly lesser teams.
Suddenly, the Mets’ dugout looks like a pretty fun place to be — and in this long season, that can count for a whole lot.
Now let’s talk about defense. What if I told you that Alvarez has outperformed Nido in nearly every defensive metric this season? (To be fair, it appears Nido couldn’t see all that well for most of it — something he just remedied with an eye procedure.)
But Alvarez isn’t just better than Nido this year; he’s better than most catchers. His framing is sixth in baseball, according to Baseball Savant — with 50.7% of borderline pitches getting called as strikes, gifting the Mets an estimated extra two runs. He has three blocks above average (eighth), and his 1.94 pop time is 0.07 seconds faster than the major-league average.
There’s room for improvement, of course. He does need to get better at catching runners, though that’s been an issue across the board thanks to new rules that make it so much easier to steal. He struggles to hit breaking and off-speed pitches, and he absolutely strikes out a lot (25.8% of the time). But all these things can be improved by consistent exposure.
All of which makes the “easy” decision to keep all four catchers in the organization by demoting Alvarez not easy at all.
Look, there’s no good answer. Nido just inked a two-year, $3.7 million contract, the Mets literally just signed Narvaez, a former All-Star who’s set to return in early June, and if Sanchez reclaims his old swing and hits (something he hasn’t done consistently since 2019), he has the type of game-changing pop the Mets’ lineup has needed for two seasons.
It’s possible the Mets can move one of the four at the trade deadline. They can choose to carry three catchers. If Sanchez hits, he can take on a DH role. It’s complicated, but Billy Eppler isn’t paid all that money to make easy decisions, either.
He should, however, make the easiest decision of all: If Alvarez keeps it up, keep Alvarez in Flushing.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
