Struggling Mets Option Struggling Francisco Alvarez to Struggling Syracuse

It’s looking like this isn’t the year for Francisco Alvarez after all. On Sunday, the day after they ended a seven-game losing streak, the Mets announced that they had optioned Alvarez to Triple-A Syracuse and called up Hayden Senger to take his place. The 23-year-old catcher already has a three-win season under his belt, and if not for a thumb injury that limited him to 100 games last season, he’d likely be a top-10 catcher in terms of WAR over the past two seasons. This season hasn’t gone to plan either, though, and Alvarez will now try to set things straight with a Syracuse Mets team that has dropped 12 of its last 14 games.

Alvarez fractured the hamate bone in his left hand on March 8, making this the second season in a row in which an injury to his catching hand has interfered with his chance to take the next step as an All-Star-level dual-threat backstop. Alvarez started a minor league rehab stint a very short 32 days later, batting .179 over 10 games at three levels. He returned to the Mets on April 25, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the team brought him back to soon. After missing a chunk of spring training and struggling during his rehab assignment, it perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise that he didn’t get off to a roaring start, but now that a skid has dropped them to one game behind the Phillies for the NL East lead, the Mets are no longer content to let him figure it out in Queens.

Let’s talk about the offense first. While it hasn’t been ideal, it hasn’t been disastrous either. Alvarez has gotten 138 plate appearances over 35 games, running a 91 wRC+. He put up a 97 wRC+ in 2023 and a 102 in 2024, so while this is the lowest mark of his career and a disappointment for a player who was expected to put it all together at the plate, it is by no means unprecedented. Alvarez had significantly worse 35-game stretches in each of his last two seasons:

Alvarez has been more aggressive of late, chasing and whiffing at career-high rates, and his 73% zone contact rate is among the worst in the league. However, because he’s increased his zone swing rate way more than his chase rate, SEAGER puts him in the 98th percentile, by far the best mark of his career. And because he’s seeing fewer strikes than he did in either of the past two seasons, Alvarez is running a career-high walk rate to go with his career-high strikeout rate. You could construct a real argument that the increased walk rate is worth the extra strikeouts, but the Mets clearly don’t see it that way. Manager Carlos Mendoza specifically cited plate discipline as Alvarez’s problem, telling reporters, “There were stretches where we felt, I felt like a couple of games where, OK, that’s what it’s supposed to look like. But then he’ll go a couple of games where he’s late with the fastball and then he chases, so just looking for consistency here.”

The other part of that argument has to do with the fact that Alvarez is crushing the baseball, though you wouldn’t know it from his career-low .098 ISO. We’re talking about a small sample, but he’s running career highs in hard-hit rate, as well as average, max, and 90th-percentile exit velocity. All that contact quality hasn’t turned into power largely because Alvarez hits the ball on the ground an awful lot; just 9% of his hard-hit balls have been in the air to the pull side, down from 29% in 2023 and 19% in 2024. The batted ball metrics are also shaping up in a weird way. Alvarez is running the highest BABIP of his career, but take a look at this:

Alvarez has gone from outperforming his wOBA when he hits the ball hard to underperforming it by quite a bit. But he’s also outperforming it when he doesn’t hit the ball hard. That’s not to say that all of this is the result of luck. Alvarez is running a career-low pull rate, and that drop-off is even more dramatic on balls in the air.

It’s not necessarily that Alvarez is struggling to catch up with pitches; he also went into the offseason determined to stop pulling the ball so much. “The primary focus for me has been to hit the ball the other way or up the middle, but there are going to be days where I am going to be pulling the baseball,” he said in April. “But probably 80 percent of the time my focus is more to the middle of the field to the opposite field.” It has worked, maybe too well. According to Statcast’s bat tracking metrics, his intercept point is 1.3 inches deeper than it was last season. At the moment of intercept, his bat went from being angled three degrees to the pull side to five degrees to the opposite field. In all, expected metrics like xwOBA think that Alvarez should be pretty much as good a hitter as he was last season, with the walks making up for the extra strikeouts and the contact quality making up for the less-than-ideal launch angles. However, DRC+, which gets deeper into the process, is much more skeptical:

Alvarez is an all-or-nothing power hitter, who is also groundball prone because he possess a flat swing; over the past three seasons, his 28 degree swing path tilt put him in just the 15th percentile. We’ve seen plenty of hitters make that work to varying degrees, but it’s not always the world’s most satisfying combination. He’s going to go through periods where he doesn’t make much contact, and he’s going to go through periods when he’s hitting the ball on the ground way, way too much. He’s been doing both this season, but it’s important to keep in mind that we’re talking about a small sample, just as we’re talking about a player coming off an injury and missing spring training.

In addition to changing his approach, Alvarez has also changed his setup, going from a relatively stationary stance with his bat resting on his shoulder to a more fluid stance with his bat angled higher and his hands lower:

As Mendoza noted on Sunday, the hamate injury cost Alvarez the chance to get comfortable with these changes.

All that said, the bigger concern comes on the defensive end. “I feel like the receiving and the blocking is probably an area that we want to see some improvement,” said Mendoza. Over the past two seasons, Alvarez was one of the best framers in the game, with nine framing runs in 2023 and seven in 2024 according to Statcast. This season, he’s at -4. Baseball Savant breaks the edges of the strike zone into eight different sections. Alvarez grades out as below average in seven of them, and among the bottom 10 in the league in four of them. In previous seasons, he was excellent at the bottom of the plate, but this season, he ranks 38th out of 56 qualified catchers. That is a major issue that needs to be addressed. Even in his outstanding rookie season in 2023, Alvarez was a below-average hitter, with nearly all of his value coming from framing. Maybe he just needs more time to recover from an injury to the base of his catching hand, but that skill is what gave him his real star potential. Without it, he’s a different player.

Alvarez’s blocking has also been the subject of much criticism, as his four passed balls are tied for fifth-most in baseball. However, Baseball Prospectus sees him as an above-average blocker this season, and Statcast sees him as exactly average. The Statcast numbers show that this is likely a situation where the eye test isn’t treating him well. Alvarez has let 17 pitches get by him in 2025, but they’re not the ones you might expect:

Alvarez’s opportunities have been quite a bit tougher this season. He’s actually been better than average on pitches that Statcast grades as having medium difficulty, but he’s given those gains back on chances that grade out as easy. But moderately difficult blocks don’t stick out that much, so what we notice are all the passed balls on easy chances. Moreover, Alvarez is currently catching 41% of would-be basestealers, so he is making up some value with his arm.

Now that we know all this, what does it say about the team’s decision to option Alvarez? It depends. If his issues merely stem from the injury and the lack of preparation time – if he’s going to figure it out eventually – then sending him down right now doesn’t make a ton of sense. He has already been ceding playing time to Luis Torrens. Torrens has been excellent at framing, which has allowed him to put up 0.7 WAR to Alvarez’s 0.5, even though his bat has been worse and his blocking actually has been bad. Senger is 28 and was running just a 59 wRC+ in Syracuse. In fact, he hasn’t put up an above-average offensive line in the minors since 2021. So swapping in Senger for even this reduced version of Alvarez will likely cost the Mets significantly in the short-term, and there’s always a risk that this kind of demotion could hurt a player’s confidence.

On the other hand, if the Mets really think that Alvarez could use a reset to work on his framing and figure out his approach, then it makes all the sense in the world to send him down right now. Mendoza is eager to get Alvarez more at-bats, but the Mets don’t think they can afford to while they’re battling for the division and Torrens is (slightly) outperforming him. It’s hard to say whether Alvarez’s struggles at the plate are the result of his new approach, residue from the injury, or simply bad luck over a short sample, but the Mets are clearly worried about his plate discipline. If they’re going to tinker with his swing, it’s probably better to do that in a lower-pressure environment. If it results in Alvarez having a great second half, it would be well worth the short-term downgrade.

To be clear, if Alvarez does bounce back at some point, there will be no way to really know the reason for it. Did the Mets help him figure something out? Did he just need some time to get back to his old self? Plenty of people will have an opinion, but we won’t know what would have happened if the team had just held to their current course. It seems safe to assume that Alvarez will get back to something like his old self at some point, and if that happens soon, it will make the Mets look very smart.