The Mets bolstered their catching depth by signing longtime Dodgers backstop Austin Barnes to a minor-league deal, the team announced on Thursday afternoon.
Barnes, 36, received an invitation to Mets’ major league spring training where he’ll have an opportunity to compete for a roster spot and keep his career alive.
Luis Torrens is the favorite to win the backup catcher job. He’s back with the Mets for a third straight year after appearing in 92 games with New York last season.
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Starter Francisco Alvarez and Hayden Senger are the only other catchers on the Mets’ 40-man roster heading into spring training.
Similar to the Craig Kimbrel signing, another minor-league deal that was made official by the club on Thursday, Barnes brings a wealth of experience from a lengthy big-league career that features plenty of deep postseason runs.
Barnes played for the Dodgers for 11 years going back to his MLB debut in 2015. He’s a two-time World Series champion he and appeared in postseason games with the Dodgers in eight separate seasons with Los Angeles.
Like Kimbrel, this is a low-risk and high-reward type of acquisition for the Mets. If Barnes is weighing the Mets down this spring and he proves he’s not worthy of a roster spot — or everybody ahead of him stays healthy — they can move on or stow him away in Triple-A. If he plays well and gets along with the Mets’ pitching staff, he could plug in as a veteran backup to begin the year.
Either way, it never hurts to have a surplus of catchers in spring training. In this case, think of how Barnes can possibly help young pitchers like Nolan McLean and Jonah Tong, working with those phenoms in Port St. Lucie after all those years of reps with veterans and All-Stars like Clayton Kershaw with the Dodgers.
Keeping Barnes’ career numbers and recent track record in mind, it’s hard to expect anything exemplary on offense from the 36-year-old this spring. He comes over to the Mets with a career slashline of .223/.322/.338 and he played in only 13 games with Los Angeles last year before getting released in May. Barnes was briefly in the Giants system on a minor-league deal last summer, but he appeared in only 10 Triple-A games before he was released by San Francisco on August 1.
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