3 New York Mets stealing money from the team due to a bad contract

2. C Omar Narvaez

With the spending they’ve done elsewhere on the roster, the catcher position automatically becomes a place the Mets won’t necessarily pay up for a big name. If their early pursuit of JT Realmuto a couple offseasons ago had come to fruition, it’d have been interesting to see what else they would or wouldn’t have subsequently done.

The Mets signed Narvaez to a two-year, $15 million deal this offseason, albeit with a player option for 2024. He has a 22-home run season on his resume (2019 with the Seattle Mariners) and he was an All-Star with the Milwaukee Brewers in 2021. But he hit just .206/.292/.305 over 84 games with the Brewers last season.

Narvaez’s $8 million salary for this year puts him in a tie with Travis d’Arnaud of the Atlanta Braves as the seventh-highest-paid catcher in baseball. Backup Tomas Nido is in line to wind up playing a fair amount this season, as he’s essentially Max Scherzer’s personal catcher. Top-tier prospect Francisco Alvarez may make his big-league arrival at some point.

So Narvaez may become pretty expensive bench material at some point this season, and essentially a sunk cost for the Mets. At least they didn’t fully commit to two years, though it’ll be crazy for him to not exercise that player option for 2024.