Mets option top prospect Francisco Alvarez to Triple-A Syracuse to start season
PORT ST. LUCIE — Francisco Alvarez will start the season in Syracuse.
The Mets optioned their top overall prospect to Triple-A on Wednesday morning as well as sent catcher Nick Meyer to minor league camp. Brett Baty, the club’s second-ranked prospect, remains in Major League camp to compete for a spot on the Mets’ Opening Day roster.
The 21-year-old catcher showed flashes of the power tool he has long been known for but he didn’t exactly put up monster numbers in Grapefruit League play, going 3-for-28 (.107) with two walks, one RBI and 10 strikeouts. He hit no home runs.
“Defensively, I felt like I was improving and I want to continue improving down there,” Alvarez said through a translator. “My bat wasn’t excelling the way that I was expecting it to, but I trust it. Going down there, I think it’s just going to help me get the reps that I really need and the experience to eventually come back up and succeed.”
After undergoing surgery on his right ankle in October, Alvarez was worked into Grapefruit League games somewhat slowly, but playing time behind the plate opened up for him when Omar Narvaez left for the World Baseball Classic. Now that Narvaez is back in camp, the Mets want him to catch their regulars for the rest of the week.
“We were running out of innings for him to catch,” manager Buck Showalter said. “He needs to catch.”
There was some offseason speculation that Alvarez would be used as a DH this season in the Major Leagues, but the Mets didn’t want to neglect the defensive side of his game. The club feels it’s important for all of their prospects to be defensively sound before playing in the big leagues, but it’s especially important for Alvarez. Although the Mets have seen some improvements to his pitch framing, ultimately this move means the organization wants him to continue to improve in Triple-A.
If Alvarez spends the entire 2023 season in Triple-A, it means that Narvaez and Tomas Nido were able to stay healthy for 162 games. The Mets don’t want to bring up Alvarez as a DH, though the possibility is there. If Triple-A pitching no longer challenges him, the club won’t have much of a choice.
But the priority is making sure he has the tools to be able to catch the club’s marquee pitchers on a daily basis. If the Mets are calling him up this season, they hope it’s because they need a catcher.
“It depends on what happens with injuries and with what everything else looks like,” Showalter said. “There’s always a scenario. That’s our hope and that’s our plan. He’s not a guy you’d like sitting around as a backup catcher. We could have to go that direction.”
The Mets were happy with what they saw from Alvarez and happy with the way he took information from catching coach Glenn Sherlock and applied it throughout camp. Showalter wasn’t afraid to challenge him to help him understand what he can and can’t get away with in the Major Leagues.
The manager was especially impressed with the way he was able to ignore his offensive struggles while he was working with pitchers.
“Catching, receiving, understanding the pitch clock — all of the little things that go into gaining the trust of your pitchers,” Showalter said. “Pitchers like throwing to him. He’s engaged in that part. What I liked was that he was struggling offensively, he wasn’t as good as he was capable of being offensively, but he didn’t once take it with him behind the plate. That’s what I was really looking for. You can’t say that about everybody, but he understands the importance of it. Talking to him today in my office, he gets it.”
Starting the season in the minor leagues where he will catch every day will help him build confidence. He only played 45 games there last season and dealt with the ankle injury, so there is still plenty to be gained. The ankle is healthy and hasn’t given him problems this spring, so Alvarez can get to Syracuse with a clean slate of sorts.
Spring training sometimes often serves as a way for teams to gauge the progress of top prospects and Alvarez, who had a brief big league stint last fall, doesn’t appear ready quite yet, but he understands what he needs to do in order to be ready soon.
“They told me that I was going to be catching a lot of games this year, so to focus in on my recovery, focus in on being there physically ready each and every day,” Alvarez said. “Because I’m going to be getting a lot of reps behind the plate.”
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