Mets add Ronny Mauricio to player pool, place Rene Rivera on 45-day injured list

The Mets have added top prospect Ronny Mauricio to their player pool and moved catcher Rene Rivera on the 45-day injured list, as the veteran is set to have elbow surgery on Wednesday to remove a bone spur.

Mauricio, who plays shortstop and is just 19 years old, ranked as the Mets’ number one prospect on our list of the team’s top 25 prospects coming into the 2020 season, and on the big national lists for all of baseball, he was ranked 66th by Baseball America, 48th by Baseball Prospectus, 62nd by MLB.com, and 35th by FanGraphs. Here’s some of what Thomas Henderson had to say about him at the time our list went up:

Mauricio always had the projectability you want in an extremely young prospect – from the time he was a highly sought after IFA to when the Mets inked him to the richest IFA deal in their history at the time, to when he made his debut in the organization at 17, he was someone to keep an eye on. 2019 was the year he really piqued mine, and many others, interest, when he jumped all the way up from Rookie ball to Single-A, hitting a solid .268/.307/.357 in 504 plate appearances. While that hardly tore the South Atlantic League down, it was impressive given his age. At only 18, he was roughly three years younger than the average player in the league, and the fact that he held his own against much older players is interesting. The power should improve as he gets older, and he looks as though he could stick at short. His 2019 showed that he can handle a full season workload, and he is just beginning to scratch the surface.

As for Rivera, he made just four plate appearances and appeared in just two games for the Mets in the shortened 2020 season before hitting the injured list.