Francisco Alvarez’s rather puzzling failure to live up to predictions of stardom seemingly has reached the crisis stage.
After a recent stretch of futility, his seventh-inning at-bat against the Braves in Atlanta on Thursday night, in fact, looked like something of a rock-bottom moment for the Mets’ struggling young catcher.
Alvarez struck out for the second time in the game, but it was the way he did it that was especially alarming. First losing his grip on the bat and sending it flying when he was fooled badly on a slider. And then, after fouling off a couple of very hittable fastballs, chasing another heater above the strike zone for the K.
“It felt like a low point for him,” was the way one major league scout put it Friday, speaking of that at-bat. “He’s not squaring up pitches he should hammer and he’s chasing pitches he should take. He looks completely lost.
“I like the way he plays the game. So in one sense I hate to say it, but I think he’s in his own head so much that the Mets need to try something drastic and send him down [to the minors]. Give him a chance to figure some things out away from the spotlight.”
The scout’s suggestion is not an outlier at this point. On social media, it actually seems to be the prevailing opinion, which isn’t stunning — Alvarez’s poor play still resonates as somewhat remarkable, considering how beloved he was by Mets’ fans as the can’t-miss kid, the high-energy, power-hitting catcher of their dreams.
Such was the hype for Alvarez just a couple of years ago. For example: In the spring of 2023, The Athletic’s prospect analyst, Keith Law, went so far as to write, “He could be as mobile as a statue and still be an above-average regular for a catcher with — dare I say it — a Mike Piazza-like upside if his bat keeps improving.”
That same spring, MLB Pipeline ranked Alvarez as the No. 3 prospect in all of baseball, behind only Gunnar Henderson and Corbin Carroll. And such projections looked on-point when Alvarez hit 25 home runs in 123 games his rookie season.
Yet here he is, two years later, hitting .229 as of Friday with a shockingly low .305 slugging percentage, with two home runs in 34 games since returning from a broken hamate bone in his hand — and just one home run since April 26. This after hitting only 11 homers in 100 games in 2023, missing time due to a torn thumb ligament.
So, what’s happened to his power? Is it the injuries? Is it his relative youth, at age 23? Or is it due more to his largely undisciplined approach at the plate that major league pitchers have exploited since his rookie year?
Law thinks it’s a combination of all of that, and still believes there’s a good chance Alvarez reaches the ceiling he once predicted for him.
“When you look at some of the numbers, he’s hitting the ball as hard as he ever has,” Law said. “He’s just not doing it consistently. Pitchers are attacking him on the outer third of the plate and he’s having trouble laying off them.
“He’s going to have to make the adjustment and he’s still young, especially when you factor in those two injuries to his hands. But it’s also a fact that some guys never make the adjustment in terms of pitch recognition at the big league level, so that remains to be seen. Also sometimes, it just takes longer for young catchers because of their defensive responsibilities.
“I certainly wouldn’t give up on Alvarez and I don’t think sending him to the minors and facing Triple-A pitching would really accomplish anything, unless the Mets believe he simply needs a mental break. In that case, maybe it would help him get a reset.”
So, opinions differ, obviously, on how to fix Alvarez. And in a sense, the biggest question may be whether his problems are more mental than mechanical.
Todd Zeile, SNY’s analyst for the Mets’ pregame and postgame shows, thinks the mental could be causing the mechanical, due to the sky-high expectations that have hovered over Alvarez since his days as that uber-prospect.
“I think he wants so badly to be that guy that everybody said he was,” Zeile said by phone recently. “And that’s made it hard for him.”
Zeile’s perspective is unique. He too broke into the big leagues as a catcher with the St. Louis Cardinals, before eventually transitioning to third base. He was sent down to the minors in his third year there, due to offensive struggles, and it proved to be exactly what he needed, returning in three weeks and going on to have a 16-year career.
And, finally, Zeile has seen nearly all of Alvarez’s at-bats in the majors. When I spoke to him, he prefaced his thoughts by saying he’s a big fan of Alvarez, noting how hard the young catcher has worked to improve defensively and how much he invests himself in gameplans and pitch-calling to do right by his pitchers and his ballclub.
“He really cares,” Zeile said. “I think that’s what everybody loves about him.”
Yet, Zeile was also candid in expressing concerns about Alvarez’s diminishing returns with the bat, starting with being affected by the prospect hype.
“I think the expectations of being such a huge power-hitting prospect have ended up hurting him,” Zeile said. “It’s hard to say exactly why the power hasn’t been there, but at some point he began searching for the power, rather than just trying to hit the ball hard and let it come organically.
“Trying to create power is a recipe for a lot of frustration at this level because it leads to a poor approach.”
Zeile breaks it down into different stages. He said when the power wasn’t there after the thumb injury in 2024, Alvarez first began trying to force the issue.
“He tried to pull more,” Zeile recalled. “In doing so, he created holes in his swing because he was trying to get the ball out front, and he started pulling off the baseball. That made him more vulnerable to off-speed stuff, breaking balls on the outer part of the plate.
“Occasionally he’d still hit one 450 feet and you’d say, ‘Ok, the power is still there, why isn’t he doing it more consistently?’ It was because pitchers recognized that he was selling out on the pull side, and they weren’t throwing those middle-in fastballs, or rarely, anyway. They exposed those holes in his swing.
“This year he tried to make adjustments to hit the ball the other way, but I think he got to the point where again, he was frustrated by the lack of power. And so at times, he goes back to trying to create a launch angle, which has led to some wild swings and made him vulnerable to chasing.
“The other night in Atlanta, he swung at a pitch and almost fell down going away from the plate. That was telling to me. If you lose balance in any direction, it should be toward home plate if you’re staying on the ball. So to see him fall away, that’s where it becomes obvious that he’s still so pull-conscious.”
Two scouts, including the one quoted earlier, offered similar observations.
“Chasing power could be the root of his problems,” said one scout. “It looks like it sometimes. But at some point you also have to ask if he just has a hard time recognizing spin, and that leads to chasing and looking bad. Even going back to his rookie year, pitchers stopped challenging him as much with the fastball in the second half and he struggled.”
The numbers back that up. In the second half of 2023, Alvarez hit just .174 with a .343 slugging percentage and only eight home runs. That after slugging .514 with 17 homers in the first half.
“He really hasn’t looked like that guy since the first half of his rookie year,” said the scout. “But I also wouldn’t discount the injuries being a factor in his development. He needs more time before anyone can judge him with any real certainty.”
As for the question of whether sending him down to the minors is worthwhile, Zeile draws on his experience in seeing the possibility that it could help Alvarez.
“I was ticked off when I was sent down but I went down for 21 days and raked,” Zeile recalls. “Part of that was working with my old minor league hitting coach and getting back to my old swing, after guys at the big league level had been trying to change my swing.
“That’s where it could be valuable for Alvarez — get out of the fishbowl for a minute, get your confidence back without the scrutiny at that level. It worked for me. But everybody reacts differently to something like that.”
Finally, touching on Zeile’s experience, it’s hard to know if Alvarez has been affected at all by any changes the organization has tried to make with his swing or approach. But Law does add that factor into the equation.
“With the Mets, you’re not seeing the development with some of their young hitters,” Law said. “[Brett] Baty is an example for me. If Alvarez were a Dodger, for example, you might be seeing a different result because I think they do a really good job of developing guys as far as swing decisions and plate discipline.
“I’m not saying it’s on the organization. Sometimes it’s just the player. One thing for sure is the power is very real with Alvarez. It’s just a matter of whether he can get to a place where that power plays for him in a big way. He’s still got time.”
At this point, however, with Luis Torrens looming as perhaps a better option to be the No. 1 catcher right now, the more pressing question is how much time the Mets are willing to give Alvarez.
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