Sometimes, even playing in New York and having that kind of stage in baseball, it seems as if Pete Alonso is hiding in plain sight. We talk a lot about the other great young hitters in baseball, because there are a lot of them. We still don’t talk nearly enough about Alonso and the career he is having. This is the one about substance over style.
Here is the substance of Alonso’s career since he made it north with the Mets in 2019, even though he wasn’t sure that was going to happen in Spring Training, and neither were the Mets.
He has hit more home runs than anybody in the sport since then. And he also has more RBIs than anybody else.
This comes from my pal John Labombarda of the Elias Sports Bureau, which knows everything. Check it out, as John wrote it:
Most homers since 2019
Pete Alonso, 152
Aaron Judge, 141
Kyle Schwarber, 130
Matt Olson, 127
Eugenio Suárez, 127
Most RBIs since 2019
Pete Alonso, 392
José Abreu, 379
Rafael Devers, 368
Nolan Arenado, 365
José Ramírez, 364
Has Alonso played more games than Aaron Judge has over this same time period? He has, nearly 100 more going into the weekend. But guess what? That is part of the substance with Alonso, too.
“He shows up every damn day,” is the way his manager, Buck Showalter, puts it. “All he does is want to play. He doesn’t rest on his laurels, because he doesn’t rest, period. Because if he’s sitting down, he can’t collide with another baseball that ends up somewhere where they can’t catch it.”
Alonso did that on Wednesday afternoon at Citi Field, hitting one 431 feet against the Padres on a day when the Mets won a three-game series from the Padres, who knocked them out of the postseason in three games last October. It gave Alonso six home runs for 2023, which gives him the Major League lead going into the third weekend of the season. He has 12 RBIs for the Mets in 13 games.
There was a moment early in the spring in Port St. Lucie, Fla., when Alonso came into Showalter’s office with the Mets’ schedule in his hand. He handed the schedule to Showalter and said, “I’ve got the six days highlighted over the year that I can DH.”
Showalter said he was already smiling.
“Don’t tell me,” the Mets manager said. “One a month.”
“You got it,” Alonso said.
A lot has happened to the Mets already this season. They lost Edwin Díaz, who had one of the most dominant seasons any closer has had in baseball history in 2022, to a knee injury suffered during Puerto Rico’s postgame celebration in the World Baseball Classic. They lost José Quintana, whom they’d counted on to be part of their rotation. Justin Verlander, coming off another Cy Young season with the Astros, has yet to make his first start because of a low-grade strain in his shoulder area (the teres major muscle, to be precise). And the Mets lost their catcher, Omar Narváez, for a couple of months with a calf injury. All of this happened before the Mets got through April. Yeah. It’s a lot, even if David Robertson has been a star so far replacing Díaz.
“I keep hearing about this slow start we’re supposed to be having,” Showalter said on Wednesday before the Mets were on their way to begin a West Coast swing in Oakland with a 7-6 record, two games behind the Braves in the NL East. “Really?”
But Brandon Nimmo, Showalter’s center fielder, is still at the top of the batting order. And Francisco Lindor, who hit a homer himself on Wednesday, is right there at No. 3, batting ahead of Alonso, who is coming off a season when he hit 40 home runs for the Mets and broke the team’s all-time single-season RBIs record with 131 while playing 160 regular-season games. Now Showalter has a front-row seat for it all.
“You know what the first thing he did in the offseason?” Showalter said. “He decided to get himself into even better shape, and showed up for Spring Training running better than ever. And if you watch him, you see that he’s a better hitter than people give him credit for.”
There was a bloop single against the Padres on Wednesday that would have gotten Alonso another RBI if Nimmo hadn’t had to wait to see if second baseman Rougned Odor might make a leaping grab of the ball before it found the grass in short right.
“You want to know what people really lose sight of with Pete?” Showalter said. “That he’s still just 28. With everything he’s done and is doing, there are better days ahead. And his teammates see the same guy every day he walks through the clubhouse door. You know what you never hear from anyone on our club? ‘Pete’s having a bad day.’” You can’t quantify how much that means, having a player like that act as if every day really is still the first day of Little League.”
Alonso is known, of course, as the Polar Bear. Bear of a player. One of the very best in baseball. Better than you think. Just watch. Every damn day.
