The Mets have agreed to a minor league contract with catcher Rene Rivera, Bob Nightengale of USA Today tweets. The deal includes an invitation to major league spring training for Rivera, who will earn a $1MM salary with up to $300K in incentives if he makes the Mets’ roster.
This is the third time since 2016 and the second offseason in a row in which the Mets have added Rivera on a minors pact. The well-traveled 36-year-old ended up playing in just nine games with the club last season. He spent the majority of the year as a member of the Mets’ Triple-A affiliate, with whom he batted .254/.319/.501 and smacked 25 home runs in 396 plate appearances.
Historically, Rivera hasn’t been all that successful at the plate in the majors, where he has hit .221/.272/.354 in 1,547 tries. However, he’s a well-regarded defender who has thrown out an excellent 36 percent of would-be base thieves during his time in the majors and earned the trust of Mets starter Noah Syndergaard.
Rivera will now attempt to work his way back to the bigs with a team whose catching situation isn’t ideal. Wilson Ramos is entrenched as the starter, though he had a somewhat disappointing 2019, and the leading candidate to back him up remains the extremely light-hitting Tomas Nido.
Welcome back, Rene. I guess Nido is still the main backup then.
There’s our 26th man. Noah’s personal catcher. Boom.
Yeah not a bad option to have. They could definitely do a lot worse!
I’m guessing that for most of the season, the Mets won’t be carrying 3 catchers. It’s a good signing for depth in case of injury
Nah, they’re not carrying 3 catchers. Rivera will start in Syracuse, and would get the call to start roughly 1/2 the games if Ramos gets hurt. You can’t have Nido starting 4 times a week – he’s really only useful as a backup.
I don’t mind Rivera, but if Syndergaard still needs a “personal catcher”, he’s turning into a Harvey head case. What pitcher says, “I have s better chance of winning by replacing my clean up hitter with a 275 pound, third string, 36 year old career .220 hitter who played in 9 games last year.”
Syndergaard needs to quit blaming the catcher for pitch selection (shake him off), poor framing (throw strikes), failing to block pitches in the dirt (try NOT throwing the ball in the dirt) and his inability to throw runners out. Syndergaard leads the league in stolen bases allowed, here’s a thought: learn to hold them on better, vary your move to home, slide step, learn an average pick off move – do ANYthing other than the same thing you have been doing for five years. Ramos is NOT the reason you are trending toward greatly underachieving.
With Syndergaard’s talent, he should be a bonafide #1, not a 12 game winner with an era approaching 4.50 at this stage of his career.
As a Mets fan, I truly hope they trade him and get some quality in return before they just lose him to free agency.
Ramos didn’t catch low most of the year. He didn’t go low until later, which is when starting pitching improved. The entire staff disliked how Ramos framed and caught. Noah was simply more vocal about it.
Is this like the 3rd stint with the Mets?
Don’t know if this counts as a stint since he finished the season here
I think it does because he was a free agent, but it depends how you look at it. Players that are under team control sign deals year by year, except for the arbitration control extensions that are becoming more common.
Somehow I feel like we have been here before.
Somehow it feels like we have been here before.
Have we been here before?
I don’t know. Somehow it feels like we’ve been here before.
It’s like deja vu all over again.
Like somehow it feels like we’ve been here before?
Can someone explain why everything i read about Wilson Ramos says he had a “down year”? The guy hit .288 with an obp that was well above his career average and constantly came up huge in big spots. I get the fact that he’s a terrible defender and i know thats huge, but he was never a standout behind the plate so that is to be expected. He was signed to be an offensive catcher and thats exactly what he’s been.
I like Ramos.
The thing is, he fits better on an AL team where he could be a DH / 1B the majority of the time, and do some catching as a backup when the primary catcher is injured or being rested for a day.
As for the Mets – they supposedly were built around their pitching staff. Then they bring in a catcher that doesn’t call good games or handle pitchers well; and is poor in blocking balls so that in critical situations with a runner on 3B Mets pitchers are hesitant to throw a hard breaking pitch for fear that it’ll turn into a passed ball and a run……and opposing batters know that’s the situation so they lie in wait.
We could go a step further and note that the overall Met defense is sub-par, and that too undermines their pitchers.
His slugging went from .487 in 2018 to .416 last season. Even if he was signed as an offensive catcher, his defense has slipped a decent bit. In 2018, he caught 29% of runners trying to steal on him, had -5 DRS, and was worth .3 framing runs. This past season, he was worth -13 DRS, and caught only 15% of runners going on him, while being worth -4.7 framing runs.
Thor, care to chime in?
I got the impression that the mets top pitchers liked throwing to Nido
He didn’t really hit for power in a year where homeruns were way up across baseball. He’s also extremely slow, and hits a ton of ground balls, which puts him dangerously close to Pujols territory in terms of how teams may start to shift him. His defense was also terrible.
Spot on, Sean. Do we want a clean up hitter who knows how drive the ball to right center with a runner on base or a run of the mill .220 light hitting defensive catcher? There are way more of those than catchers capable of .285 /85 rbi. If you are going to carry a third catcher, which you should now, he has to be a multiple position player. Had d’Arnaud EVER been developed properly in my, he ya ideal as the 26th man, like the kid in Texas with Kiner in his name. Come to think of it, how do the Mets NOT have this kid in the organization?
Nice move. Team needs catching depth.
He’ll help settle in the staff, teach the catchers, he’ll practically be another coach.
This catcher is fat.
well, if there was any question both mlb and triple a were messing with the ball, rivera’s home run total proves it.
hit 26 homers last year (25 at aaa, 1 in the majors), career high was 14 before 2019 (and that’s only if you count homers hit in indy ball before signing with the yanks minor league system)..
just pointing that out is all
I love how this guy’s high school name is Papa Juan High School. Same as Jose Berrios.
set up for the Marte trade.
awesome