Mets won't rule out Francisco Alvarez coming up to catch this season: 'Never say never'

Mets catching prospect Francisco Alvarez has started to catch fire recently for Triple-A Syracuse, and he launched a mammoth homer earlier this week that appeared to leave the stadium entirely.

With the Mets not addressing the catcher position at the trade deadline and James McCann and Tomas Nido not providing much offensively, how close is Alvarez to being called up?

"In the immediate future, we're not gonna be calling him up. But are we sending evaluators through there, and do I get debriefs from our coordinators that go through there? Yep, absolutely," GM Billy Eppler said Thursday while speaking on Carton & Roberts on WFAN and SNY. "Are we watching him close? We're watching him close. We're watching everybody in that Syracuse lineup very closely, because that's our group."

The thought over the last few months, as Alvarez hit his way from Double-A to Triple-A, was that if he got promoted this season, it would be as a DH -- not a catcher.

That's because the list of 20-year-old catchers who have come up to the majors is very small. And Alvarez would not only be taking on the responsibility of managing a big league staff at an incredibly young age, but would be tasked with doing so in the heat of a pennant race and potentially into the playoffs.

Still, Eppler would not rule out the possibility of Alvarez being called up to catch at some point this season.

"If the evaluators and the coaches that are doing the work with him day-to-day say yes, I'd have to keep an open mind about it. But it would be something that you would really scrutinize before firing that bullet," Eppler explained, adding that it's a potentially "dangerous" thing to do.

But when pressed on whether that made it likely that Alvarez would only be a potential option as a hitter, Eppler wouldn't bite.

"I wouldn't say. I wouldn't say one way or another," Eppler said. "He's doing both right now and he's checking boxes. Kind of some of the development objectives that we laid out for him before even moving him to Triple-A. He's getting there and he's holding up his end of the bargain and working towards it. Never say never."

Alvarez is hitting just .185/.353/.431 in 19 games since being promoted to Triple-A, but those numbers are skewed by a very rough start there.

Over his last 11 games, Alvarez has hit safely nine times, including four home runs and three doubles.