Tomas Nido, not Francisco Alvarez, is the catcher who gives Mets best chance to win now
A few hours before the Mets’ home opener, Buck Showalter was asked how he would balance the goals of winning games and helping Francisco Alvarez develop.
“Very heavily weighted toward winning games,” the manager said with that twinkle that he tends to employ when leaving his most pointed sentences unspoken.
That was the right answer, of course. This is the big leagues. And while the skipper quickly tossed in an aside that he thinks Alvarez can help after rushing here to replace the injured Omar Narvaez, he also complimented Tomas Nido an estimated 768 times in a 16-minute rap session with the media.
Buck knows ball, and Buck knows that Nido is borderline elite at a key defensive position. For that reason -- not to mention the fact that Alvarez is not yet a proven hitter -- Nido gives the Mets the best chance to win.
As exciting as it was for fans to see a top prospect return to Queens, the fact is that the loss of Narvaez left the team in a worse place. That’s no knock on Alvarez, who has elite power and undiminished potential, but who has not yet performed consistently enough at Triple-A to earn a non-emergency callup.
More to the point, the baseball philosophy to which both Showalter and GM Billy Eppler subscribe places defense at the top of any catcher’s profile. Experience is important for any position. Prospect hype is hardly on the list.
While working in the Yankees’ front office more than a decade ago, Eppler was one of the pioneers of catcher framing, or the ability to receive a borderline pitch and present it to umpires as a strike.
Those stats have become widespread in the years since, and this season earned space on MLB’s deep-dive website baseballsavant.com. In a key framing metric, “strike rate,” Nido was the fifth-best in MLB last year, Narvaez was seventh best.
Both are also considered strong at the unquantifiable but crucial skill of working with pitchers to call games.
Because of those facts, the best way for the Mets to make up for the loss of Narvaez for the next few months will be to utilize Nido’s similar skill set.
The equation might be different if Alvarez had been a dominant offensive performer over the past year. Perhaps he could have mashed his way up the depth chart, but he is still working to make more consistent contact.
In a brief cup of coffee last September, Alvarez batted .167 for the Mets and struck out in a third of his at-bats. In spring training this year, he hit .107 with a similar strikeout rate. And while he homered twice in his first 16 at-bats for Triple-A Syracuse this year, he also struck out eight times.
Asked on Friday if Alvarez was ready to be an offensive player in the major leagues, Showalter stopped well short of a full-throated yes.
“I don’t think anyone is ever for sure a finished product,” he said.
By the way: Alvarez is 21 years old. Finished products at that age are exceedingly rare. It’s okay that he’s still developing; perhaps one day he will be an All-Star like Narvaez.
But this month, with the Mets beginning a season that they hope will end in late October, Alvarez is best suited for Triple-A. Narvaez’s injury makes that impossible, but that doesn’t mean he is ready for significant big league playing time.
While he’s here, Alvarez needs to be an occasional catcher and designated hitter, and a full-time understudy. Even if Alvarez’s bat catches fire, the Mets pitchers need to throw the bulk of their innings to a seasoned catcher.
“It’s kind of like a backup quarterback that gets drafted out of college,” Showalter said. “Everybody knows he’s going to be a really good player, but the time he spends as a backup is very valuable, too. Tomás is pretty good, OK? He does a great job for us."
