New York Mets catcher Francisco Alvarez will miss six to eight weeks after fracturing the hamate bone on his left hand, manager Carlos Mendoza disclosed on Sunday.
The 23-year-old backstop suffered the injury while taking live at-bats on Saturday and will undergo the procedure on Monday.
“After his second at-bat, he felt something, came in,” Mendoza said. “The trainers checked him out and sent him for x-rays that showed the fracture.
The timeline projects a 2025 season debut sometime in either late April or early May, which keeps New York’s starting catcher sidelined for at least the first month of the season.
“It’s always hard,” Mendoza said. “It’s always tough when one of your guys go down like that… You’ve got to keep going. Nobody’s going to feel sorry for us. Everybody deals with injuries. We’ll get him back.”
It will force the Mets to find another catcher to back up Luis Torrens. Jackson Reetz and Chris Williams, who were both non-roster invites to spring training after being signed over the winter, along with 2018 draft pick Hayden Senger, are in-house options.
Reetz, 29, has 17 plate appearances at the major-league level. Williams, 28, has never made it past Triple-A. He was most recently in the Minnesota Twins organization.
When asked if he would go outside the organization for help, president of baseball operations David Stearns said, “We’ll see.”
“I think we feel good about the guys we have in camp,” Stearns said (h/t SNY). “Any time you have an injury to a regular player, you’re going to see what’s out there. We don’t anticipate this being an extremely lengthy injury.
Alvarez was coming off a slumping sophomore campaign in which he hit .237 with 11 home runs and 47 RBI — a significant drop-off from the 25 he hit in 2023. The inconsistencies prompted a complete revamp to his approach at the plate this offseason, though it did not boost his spring training numbers much. He was 5-for-22 with two RBI.
