Stop me if you’ve heard this before: This was supposed to be the year for Francisco Alvarez. He had an electric rookie season for the Mets in 2023, putting up 3.0 WAR thanks to excellent framing numbers and a power-heavy approach that balanced 25 home runs with a .209 batting average for a 97 wRC+. Coming into the 2024 season, he was poised to go from breakout rookie to full-blown star, but he got off to a slow start and suffered a torn UCL in his left thumb in April. Alvarez returned in June and took a few days to get going, but put up a 112 wRC+ over his last 78 games and finished the season with 1.9 WAR. He’s now 23 years old, and once again, 2025 was supposed to be the year that he put it all together. Instead, Mets manager Carlos Mendoza told reporters on Sunday that Alvarez fractured the hamate bone in that same left hand during live batting practice on Saturday. He’ll have surgery today and be out for six to eight weeks, missing the first month or so of the season.
As the injury affects the meat of Alvarez’s catching hand, it would be reasonable to expect the absence to fall on the longer side of that range. However, Baseball Prospectus’ Recovery Dashboard lists two catchers who fractured their hamate bones early in the season – Francisco Cervelli in 2016 and James McCann in 2022, when he was playing for the Mets – and neither missed more than 44 days. Just to muddle our expectations even more, hamate injuries are thought sap a hitter’s power upon their return, but a 2022 study from Jason Collette reveals no such pattern. As power is the cornerstone of Alvarez’s game, losing it would pretty much crush his offensive profile, but it’s worth noting that, despite the thumb surgery, he actually put up higher max and 90th percentile exit velocities in 2024 than he did in 2023. The injury is obviously unwelcome news, and the last thing Alvarez needs is yet another surgery on his catching hand. Moreover, he’ll lose half of his spring training ramp up and have to jump into major league action after a rehab assignment. Still, this is not normally a major injury and there’s a decent chance that he won’t return in notably diminished form.
So what are the Mets going to do at catcher for the first month of the season? Without a doubt, they’re going to be much worse. Before the injury, our Depth Charts ranked the team eighth at the catcher spot, with Alvarez expected to make 474 plate appearances and earn 3.6 of the position’s total 4.1 WAR. We’ve now got Mets catchers ranked 12th, getting 371 PAs from Alvarez, along with 2.6 of their total 3.6 WAR. (To be clear, that doesn’t factor in any potential drop-off in performance from Alvarez upon his return.) If you’re doing the math there, the Mets are going to lose just about 120 PAs and 1.0 WAR from Alvarez. According to Depth Charts, they’ll replace Alvarez with 100 PAs and 0.5 WAR from Luis Torrens and Jakson Reetz (along with a handful of PAs from Chris Williams). Our projections say losing a month of Alvarez means losing half a win, and that’s if he doesn’t face any setbacks and performs pretty much exactly like he performed after he returned from last year’s injury. With the Braves and Phillies loaded for bear, the Mets don’t necessarily have that kind of margin for error. Moreover, it’s pretty easy to argue that the projections are painting too rosy a picture.
Last year, Torrens put up solid defensive numbers and a 90 wRC+ for 0.8 WAR over 48 games. That was by far the best season of his career. In fact, before 2024, he had put up negative WAR in four of his six major league seasons, combining for -0.9 WAR over 271 games. It would not be at all shocking to see him have another sub-replacement level season in 2025. Reetz is a 29-year-old journeyman who came up with the Nationals and made it into two games for them in 2021. He also got into six games with the Giants in 2024. The Mets signed Reetz to a minor league deal in November, and at the time he was mostly considered organizational depth. With so little to go on, the projections are pegging him as right around replacement level by default. All of this is to say that even before Alvarez went down, the Mets could’ve used a better plan for backup catcher. At this point, it’s hard to imagine that they won’t move to reinforce the position.
The obvious candidates are Yasmani Grandal and McCann, who are still available in free agency. Jay Jaffe wrote up Grandal as the best available catcher few weeks ago, while over at MLB Trade Rumors, Mark Polishuk noted that Grandal played for the 2019 Brewers, a team that was run by current Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns. At this point in their careers, neither Grandal nor McCann has the ceiling to come in and make the Mets forget about Alvarez, but their floors are way above those of Torrens and Reetz. The Mets will presumably explore the trade market, too, and if they don’t want to spend any money at all, they can wait and pick up a catcher who becomes available as other teams make roster decisions over the next couple of weeks.
There’s one more factor that makes this injury such a bummer. Alvarez is still just 23 years old, and although he’s been limited by injury, I want to make sure we appreciate what he’s already been able to accomplish. According to our database, his 3.0-WAR performance in 2023 was the 28th most valuable rookie season for a catcher in AL/NL history. His 5.0 total career WAR is 10th most all time among catchers before their age-23 season. His 37 home runs are tied for second. Catchers just don’t usually play this well this young. Adley Rutschman started his age-23 season in Double-A. Alvarez is entering his third season as the Mets’ unquestioned starter. We’re talking about a player who has the chance to put together a really special career, and for the second season in a row, the starting blocks have been kicked out from under him.
