Why the Mets will sit Francisco Alvarez more often the rest of the season
Mets catcher Francisco Alvarez at Citi Field on Wednesday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
ST. LOUIS — By about any measure, Francisco Alvarez’s rookie season has been a resounding success.
His homer-hitting habit has him on a list right behind Johnny Bench. He has earned widespread praise from pitchers for his defensive and game-calling abilities. Unlike his fellow Mets youngsters, he has firmly entrenched himself in the team’s plans for 2024 and beyond, turning a position that long has been a question mark into an exclamation point.
Happy with what he has accomplished and wary of asking for too much from their 21-year-old catcher, however, the Mets plan to have the rest of Alvarez’s season look a little different. For his own sake, they want to play him less down the stretch.
“Sometimes because someone is young, they think they can play every inning and every pitch,” manager Buck Showalter said. “You don’t necessarily see things physically. You see concentration. You see the mental, emotional part of it. You get mentally and emotionally tired as much or more than you do physically.”
Catching coach Glenn Sherlock said: “You don’t want to expose him to something that he hasn’t done too abruptly. It’s gotta be a gradual process, to have his body acclimate to that type of workload. His workload is still pretty substantial . . . He’s doing very well in handling that. But we want to be aware of where he’s at, make sure that he’s going OK, stays healthy and hopefully productive.”
Including the Mets’ 7-1 win over the Cardinals on Friday night, Alvarez has started 82 games behind the plate and caught 720 2⁄3 innings (major and minor leagues combined) this season.
Last year, those totals were 78 and 692 1⁄3.
Because he already has worked more this year — with about a quarter of the season to go — than he did all of last year, the next month and a half will include a heavy dose of workload management. The Mets are thinking Alvarez will play something like three of every five games the rest of the way. That would put his number of starts in the range of 105 to 110 games.
“We’ve got some flexible but hard numbers we’ve looked at, where we want to get him, how much he’s going to catch between now and the end of the season to make sure he lands in the right place,” Showalter said. “The at-bats will follow that, too.”
Alvarez says he feels fine physically, “like I have a lot of energy.” But his overarching goal is to finish the year healthy.
After the 2022 season, he had surgery on his right ankle, which messed with his offseason regimen. This year, he wants to do more lower-body exercises, hitting and sprinting.
Among his lessons learned in recent months: No need to go all out all the time.
“I like working. But in the back of my mind, I have to say, I’m not just going to go work out for the sake of working out,” Alvarez said through an interpreter. “I have to keep in mind that I have to be fresh for being on the field. I’m not going out there just to look strong. I want to feel fresh on the field. That’s the biggest thing, being smart about the whole thing.”
Who taught him to be smart?
Veteran catcher Omar Narvaez, standing at the next locker over, raised his hand and glared at Alvarez.
“Sometimes Narvaez pulls me aside and says, that’s it, you’re done,” Alvarez said, also naming Francisco Lindor and head performance coach Dustin Clarke. “Sometimes if we’re taking pop-ups behind the plate, he’s like, how many more do you need? Do you need 20, 30 more? Relax. And sometimes we’re doing tag plays and he’ll leave and I’ll just stay there. But I should probably be following him.”
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.
