Luis Torrens Has Arrived, Just a Few Years Late

If, like me, you’re a weird baseball transactions sicko, you probably first heard of Luis Torrens at the tail end of 2016. That’s when the Padres, in the midst of an A.J. Preller-led teardown, shocked baseball by taking three low-minors players in the Rule 5 Draft and putting them all on the major league roster for 2017. It was a bold, unheard of tactic. The three players – Allen Córdoba, Miguel Díaz, and Torrens – were clearly not ready for the majors. Torrens, the most advanced of the trio, was 21 and had around 200 plate appearances of full-season minor league ball under his belt, and he was still learning his new position of catcher.

That trio was famously overmatched in 2017. Torrens racked up -1.3 WAR in 139 plate appearances, Córdoba -1.0 WAR in 227 of his own, and Diaz -0.7 WAR in 41 2/3 innings pitched. The whole experiment was an embarrassment for the league, and no one has since tried similar chicanery. The Padres sent them down after the season, as soon as they were eligible to do so without having to return them to their previous organizations; Torrens and Córdoba spent all of 2018 in the minors, and both struggled in A Ball. Torrens did finally return to the majors as a backup in 2019, but Preller flipped him to Seattle a year later and he slid into journeyman status. From 2019 through 2023, he bounced around, rarely getting consistent playing time, ending up with 668 plate appearances, a 92 wRC+, and -0.4 WAR thanks to iffy defense.

I’ve used what San Diego did in this particular Rule 5 Draft as a cautionary tale when people ask me about the risks of rushing low-level minor leaguers to The Show. I firmly believe that this Rule 5 manipulation interrupted each of their career arcs – they just weren’t ready for the challenge, which is hardly unexpected given where they’d been playing. Each was a promising prospect, but in the six years after the Padres selected them, the amount of time you’d expect them to be under team control, they combined for -3.2 WAR.

With all of that as background information, it was something of a surprise to see Torrens turn into a viable backup catcher. In 2024, he caught on with the Mets and put together a solid, though brief, campaign. He displayed the cannon arm that brought him early headlines as a professional and framed pitches well, to boot. They kept him around as their primary backup heading into 2025, which brings us to this article.

See, Torrens isn’t playing like a backup right now. Since joining the Mets, he’s looked like a starter, with a 103 wRC+ and excellent defensive metrics over about half a season of playing time (84 games, 238 plate appearances). Strange path to the majors aside, could he actually be the kind of player that his prospect status once portended? Let’s look into his current form with a fresh eye and see if this looks real and sustainable.

I’ll start, as is proper for a catcher, with defense. Torrens learned catching at a relatively advanced age and tore his labrum as a teenager, missing developmental time as a result. When he hit the majors, he was extremely raw, but scouts praised his athleticism and arm and thought he’d be a plus defender given a normal developmental path. And while that “normal developmental path” didn’t happen, you can see what those scouts were talking about when you watch Torrens play defense today.

First, there’s the receiving. He was not good at it when he debuted, to put it mildly. But presenting pitches as strikes is a skill learned slowly through repetition, and Torrens has consistently improved. Depending on which of the galaxy of catcher defense approximations you want to trust, he’s either average or just above average as a receiver, and he’s particularly good at getting low strikes. This could come right out of a catching textbook:

Likewise, Torrens was new to the distinctive motions associated with blocking pitches in the dirt and snaring wild fastballs when he first hit the major leagues. From 2019 through 2022, Statcast had him down as blocking 20 fewer pitches than an average catcher would’ve stopped, and I concur with their assessment, at least in magnitude if not in exact number. (I’m not watching all those videos to find out.) It got so bad that the Mariners used Torrens at DH instead of catcher in 2021.

Yet again, though, he seems to have learned. From 2019-22, he was about six blocks below average per 1,000 block opportunities. That’s awful, to be honest. We’re talking worst-in-majors-level work out there. Shea Langeliers and Francisco Alvarez, the two worst blocking catchers in 2024 per Statcast, were slightly less bad in their horrid defensive seasons than Torrens had been during that early-career span. But Torrens has worked on his craft here, too. He’s still not good, but he’s gotten far better. Numbers-wise, he’s been two blocks below average per 1,000 opportunities, garden-variety below average instead of catastrophic.

Even when he was barely sticking around in the majors, Torrens had a big arm, the clearest plus tool on his scouting report. And he’s grown into that arm, to put it lightly. Over the past two years, he’s the fourth-best catcher in terms of caught stealing above average. That’s total times caught stealing above average, not a rate statistic, and he spent all of 2024 and some of 2025 as a part-time player. In other words, he’s outrageously good at this skill. Torrens and Freddy Fermin stand high above the rest in the majors when it comes to preventing steals; they are catching would-be thieves on more than 45% of their attempts. No other catcher is above even 35%. Don’t run on Luis, or you’ll regret it.

You’ll notice that makes Torrens a pretty good defender overall. He’s a plus receiver, the most important category. He’s a reasonable, below-average blocker, certainly not outside the norm for a major league starter. And he’s one of the best running-game controllers in baseball, combining a big arm with a fast transfer and good accuracy.

I’m not surprised that Torrens is good at all of these things. Read scouting reports from his pre-Padres days, and you’ll see plenty of praise for his long-term fit at the position. One thing those reports don’t read like is the description of a catcher about to play major league games. Here’s old friend Dan Farnsworth’s estimation of Torrens from our 2016 Yankees Prospects list, nine months before the Padres selected the catcher and took him to the major leagues: “Still relatively new to catching, his skill work needs a couple years to reach its potential behind the plate, but he showed a good knack for receiving and had a plus arm.”

I’m ready to believe that Torrens has grown into that potential. The data are compelling, and catcher defense is a high-frequency event, so I’m quicker to trust the statistics there. I’m also willing to believe it because Torrens passes the eye test; he looks smooth out there, and you definitely can’t fake his nose for catching would-be basestealers. That newfound defensive ability means Torrens will have a big league job as long as he can sustain his current level behind the dish. Every team could use a backup with his array of skills. Hitting is optional for a part-time catcher; defense is not. But Torrens might be a better than that.

Please don’t pay too much attention to Torrens’ top-10 barrel rate across the entire major leagues. That might give you the wrong idea of his potential as a hitter. He’s hot, no doubt, but I’m closer to believing his actual results statistics than one top-level Statcast number here. Let’s start with those, then: In his two seasons in Queens, he’s hitting .244/.319/.390, good for a 103 wRC+, with 17 doubles and four homers. He’s striking out 22.3% of the time and walking 9.2% of the time, with a 9.6% swinging strike rate.

You can picture guys with this general profile, I promise. A doubles-over-dingers hitter with reasonable contact ability? I’m thinking Alec Bohm or a dollar-store version of Freddie Freeman. Brendan Donovan is too good of a contact hitter to fit this mold, but maybe he’ll help you get the idea.

For the record, I think that all of those guys (well, I guess Dollar Store Freddie Freeman is more concept than man) are better hitters than Torrens. But my point is that his general skill set is consistent with major league success. His bat speed is slightly below average, but he squares the ball up frequently, chases pitches in the dirt infrequently, and puts a ton of his contact either in the air or on a low line drive. He’s an all-fields hitter, with more homers and doubles to the opposite field than to the pull side. I don’t think he could threaten 20 homers even with a full season’s worth of plate appearances, but I do think he’d rack up plenty of doubles.

If you’re like me, you love seeing things through the filter of averages, and so I did just that. I regressed swinging strike rate, hard-hit rate, chase rate, and GB/FB ratio against wRC+ to try to explain how Torrens’ skill over the past two years translates into production. The regression wasn’t great, but it had some predictive power and put Torrens at a 105 wRC+ equivalent. Maybe you’d prefer a projection system, which among other things is a fancier version of what I tried. ZiPS thinks Torrens will be an average hitter the rest of the way, while Steamer has him down for a 92 wRC+. But I think that those are probably misleadingly low because of his strange trajectory, and in any case, they match up fairly well with my estimates anyway. In plain English, Torrens is, at the very least, likely to be a competent major league hitter, within shouting distance of average, for the immediate future.

So far, this sounds like faint praise across the board. We’re getting a whole article about a guy who is a competent defender and competent hitter? But, uh, yes, we are. That’s a rare combination for catchers! Here’s a list of all of the catchers who posted a 100 or better wRC+ with above-average defense in 2024, minimum 200 plate appearances: Cal Raleigh, Victor Caratini, Gabriel Moreno, Austin Wells, Travis d’Arnaud, and Francisco Alvarez. Heck, d’Arnaud and Alvarez cleared the bar by the slimmest of margins and Caratini had a career year. This skill set is more rare than you think.

For Torrens, this improvement is better late than never. He’s forced the Mets into quite a bind, in fact. Alvarez is the heir apparent, the assumed catcher of the future in New York. He’s a top prospect who burst onto the scene in 2023 with better-than-expected defense and a heralded power bat. But simply put, he hasn’t outplayed Torrens. He has a career 99 wRC+ and his defensive value is up in the air. He recorded spectacular receiving numbers in 2023, but he’s gotten worse with each passing year since then, and he’s clearly a poor blocker.

The thinking behind keeping Alvarez as the everyday starter is simple: He’s the future, silly. He’s 23 and on the way up; Torrens is 29 and will probably never be better than he is right now. But here’s the hard truth: Young catchers mostly don’t pan out. Here are the top-five catchers aged 26 or below from 2018:

Here’s 2019:

2021:

And 2022:

My point in showing you these lists is to make you stop and take a breath when you see “top young catcher.” Some of these guys have worked out. Smith and Raleigh have been consistently excellent. Contreras and Rutschman were close behind before this year, and I’d still lump them into a similar category as those two. But most of these touted young backstops don’t have long careers at the top. It’s a tough position both physically and mentally, and betting on long-term viability is a fraught proposition as a result.

I think it’s hard to argue, based on the past two years of data, that Alvarez is meaningfully better than Torrens right now. And if you think the future is broadly uncertain, and that the Mets care a lot about winning in 2025, sacrificing the present for an ambiguous payoff doesn’t make much sense. So here’s my proposal: Put them in a time share.

Thus far, the Mets have treated Alvarez like the starter even as Torrens has continued to excel. Since returning from a season-opening IL stint, Alvarez has racked up twice as many plate appearances across twice as many starts. Meanwhile, he’s striking out 30% of the time, has only four extra-base hits, and has a below-average batting line despite a .357 BABIP.

I wouldn’t bury Alvarez, to be clear. I still like his offensive promise and believe in the upside. But I doubt his career is going to change significantly if he bats 350 times this season instead of 450. Meanwhile, Torrens has just been better of late, and there are many reasons to believe he’s capable of playing at this level at least for a little bit. Alvarez can also moonlight at DH from time to time if the Mets are insistent on maxing out his playing time.

Regardless of what they do, though, I can’t get enough of the Luis Torrens story. It would be so, so easy to just write him off thanks to his long career of mediocrity. But that doesn’t line up with how much he’s improved from the initial, wildly early major league call-up. It doesn’t line up with how rare it is to combine solid defense and acceptable offense, even for a few years, at catcher. The Mets found a hidden gem. Now it’s on them to make the most of their good fortune.