In an ideal scenario, Carlos Mendoza wouldn’t have used Luis Torrens at all.
The backup-turned-starting Mets catcher took a ball off his right wrist during Friday’s game, arrived at Citi Field with a painful contusion Saturday and, after trying to ramp up pregame, ended up being a late scratch.
But even though the Mets replaced him in the lineup with Hayden Senger, Torrens told Mendoza, “If you need me, I’ll be ready to go.”
And Mendoza did. He needed Torrens to catch the final two frames after pulling Senger for a pinch hitter in the seventh.
He needed Torrens to deliver a single in the ninth that moved Jose Siri to third and set up Francisco Lindor’s game-winning sacrifice fly during the Mets’ 3-2 victory over the Blue Jays at Citi Field.
A day that started as an injury scare turned — before the start of the eighth inning — into a question about who the Mets emergency catcher might be and then ended with some reassurance about who they’ll depend on behind the plate until Francisco Alvarez returns.
“Adrenaline sometimes does what it needs to do,” Torrens told The Post through a team interpreter, “and in a situation like [Saturday], where I wasn’t necessarily 100 percent, I was a little bit less than that, I was able to kinda overcome a little bit of the pain I had.”
Alvarez has been sidelined since spring training after fracturing the hamate bone in his left hand, and that created a spot for Senger to break spring training on the 26-man roster.
So when Torrens was removed from the starting lineup less than an hour before first pitch Saturday, that forced the 28-year-old to make just his second career start.
He grounded out to second in the third inning and struck out to end the fifth, but once the seventh arrived, that’s when, for a few brief moments, it became interesting for the Mets.
After Mark Vientos and Brett Baty both singled and Siri drew a walk, Mendoza opted against having Senger face the Blue Jays bullpen and brought Starling Marte off the bench.
But Marte hit a weak grounder back to reliever Yimi García just off the mound, and Torrens popped out of the dugout as Senger’s replacement.
And that all set the stage for the ninth, when Torrens worked a 3-1 count, when he ripped a slider into left field, when third base coach Mike Sarbaugh held Siri at third base, when — with all of that overlapping — Torrens served as the exact jolt the Mets needed.
“In a situation like that, you’re just trying to win the game,” Torrens said. “You have to give a ton of credit to Siri for getting on base and then getting to second, so at that point, my job was to put the ball in play.”
