New York Mets DFA Tomás Nido
Out with the old and in with the new: the New York Mets are designating catcher Tomás Nido for assignment, Mike Puma of the New York Post first reported Monday.
Hearing that the expectation is the Mets will work out a trade that involves Tomas Nido, who was designated for assignment by the club today.
— Mike Puma (@NYPost_Mets) June 5, 2023
Nido, 29, was injured for a good portion of this season but was playing poorly when he was with the big league club. He has just seven hits, all of which were singles, in 53 at-bats with only one RBI. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a player who has had a worse OPS+ than Nido this season, sitting at a poultry -21 (100 is the league average).
Nido is one of the longest-tenured Mets, being with the club since 2017 and starting sporadically. However, even with Nido hanging around for a while, he was never really any good as a hitter. The catcher never had an OPS+ of 100 or better in a season where he played more than 10 games.
He was always a pretty decent defender, even being a Gold Glove finalist in 2022, but his bat could never catch up. Even with his career-long struggles at the plate, Nido was always there for the Mets as a backup and came up with some big moments, like this walk-off against Detroit in 2019.
This was bound to happen at some point for the Mets’ catching group. Omar Narváez has returned from an injury that kept him out for most of the season. Narváez signed with the Mets this past offseason to play a majority of the catcher reps, but even he probably won’t have that luxury.
Instead, the starting catcher title has been earned by Francisco Álvarez. While Álvarez has cooled off a bit to start June, the catcher dominated the month of May with unprecedented production out of a Mets catcher. His arrival may have been considered to be premature, but he’s here, and he’s not going anywhere.
So that leaves Tomas Nido to be the casualty. It’ll be interesting to see how a few things unfold, starting with his destination.
An MLB team could actually use Tomás Nido behind the dish. Sure, he isn’t a good hitter, but he has always been a plus defender in his career. He even ranked in the top 90 percentile in catcher framing in 2021 and 2022, according to Baseball Savant.
While you’re getting a liability at the plate, you’re getting a solid defender who has experience catching the best pitchers in the world, namely Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom and Zack Wheeler. He’ll probably end up as a San Francisco Giant like every other former Met from the mid-2010s.
The next thing to think about is what will happen with Narváez and Álvarez. I’d assume Álvarez gets the bulk of the playing time, but exactly how much are they going to play him? Will it be an even 50/50 split? If so, he better be able to hit just as well as Álvarez for Mets fans to not lose their minds.
Álvarez and Narváez is simply the sexiest option for the Mets catching corps at this time. Tomas Nido was bound to go, but Mets fans will remember him with some good memories.
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