JUPITER, Fla. — The Mets can’t let Pete Alonso get away for all the reasons the Yankees couldn’t let Aaron Judge get away, even before Judge hit 62. Alonso is the Mets’ Judge. It is as simple as that.
Alonso is a homegrown, home run talent. He has hit more home runs since he got to the big leagues than Judge has hit, or anybody else in the sport has hit, for that matter, and it’s not as if all the other guys haven’t had the same chance. And when this season is over, the Mets can’t let him go hit his home runs somewhere else. It wouldn’t be as dumb as trading away Tom Seaver, because nothing they’ve ever done or could ever do compares with that, and the way it shattered the relationship between the team and its fans in 1977.
But it would be the dumbest thing since.
Alonso is the biggest star in New York sports that nobody talks nearly enough about, or seems to appreciate enough. He is the Polar Bear, he is the Home Run Derby guy, he is the guy who broke Judge’s rookie record for home runs the year after Judge set it. Alonso has done what he’s done in New York the same as Judge has, as a slugging first baseman that his former manager, Buck Showalter, calls “country strong.” In addition to everything else, he is the most popular player the Mets have, by a lot.
He is more important to Mets fans than the owner or his money, certainly more important than the new set of numbers guys in the front office, fronted now by David Stearns. There has been a lot of change around the Mets since Alonso made it to the big leagues. The owner had changed, the names in the front office have changed. Alonso is already working on his third Mets manager, just five years into his career.
The thing that does not change around the Mets is Alonso.
He shows up every day, and he hits home runs. In those five years in the big leagues, he has missed a grand total of 24 games. Twenty-four. In a sport that is driven by numbers and sometimes suffocated by them, it is one of the most impressive stats anywhere.
Alonso is absolutely their biggest star. And missed just eight games last season. Judge, who ran into that outfield door at Dodger Stadium in June, missed 56 for the Yankees. There was season earlier in his career when he missed 50, and another when he missed 60. Giancarlo Stanton has missed around a million since he got to Yankee Stadium. Showalter always talks about players who “post up.” He means the ones who show up. Alonso shows up. Darryl Strawberry was another homegrown slugger for the Mets once. Not like Alonso, who is a young Mike Piazza, except he has never played anywhere else.
The Mets have to make sure that Alonso doesn’t leave them the way Piazza left the Dodgers when he was young. Of course Pete is represented by Scott Boras now, an agent who has wildly misread the current free agent market in baseball. Boras has a history of letting his stars play out their contracts until free agency the way Juan Soto is doing the same thing across town right now with the Yankees. But maybe Boras ought to take a step back — without nearly falling and breaking a hip tripping over his own ego — and see how perfect a fit Alonso is for his team, for his city, for Mets fans.
And the owner of the Mets, Steve Cohen, ought to take a look at how much money it cost the Yankees not to get Judge signed long-term before he hit the 62, and they had misread HIS market, and ended up having to cough up $360 million for the simple reason that they had no choice.
“My job is pretty simple,” Alonso told me before the Mets played the Cardinals at Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium on Friday afternoon. “I go out, every single game, trying to justify my name being written into the lineup card.”
He grinned then.
“I just plan to age like fine wine,” he said, “and not milk.”
The Mets didn’t know what they had with the kid from Plant High. Nobody had any idea he would be this good. Then he hit 53 home runs as a rookie, and now he was the kind of breakout star as a kid that Dwight Gooden had been in 1984, when Gooden was still a teenager. Doc did it with fastballs. Alonso did it hitting balls out of sight. So he breaks rookie records, he breaks Mets home run records, he breaks RBI records. The Mets simply cannot risk losing him. He is as good a person as he is a teammate. As he is a Met.
“My goals haven’t changed,” he said, standing next to the batting cage, after Francisco Lindor had whooped and hollered and sounding like a cheerleader while Alonso launched balls toward the team bus. “I want to earn my stripes every game, every year. I want to be the best.”
I asked him if he is ready for the drama that this season will bring. He knew I was talking about the drama of his contract.
“I don’t look at it that way,” he said. “I look at the hard part already being over. Now I just want to do what I’ve always done, which means play and have fun.”
He was Rookie of the Year in 2019, and only finished 7th in the MVP voting, even if there wasn’t a more valuable hitter in the league that year. He has hit the 53 homers in a season. He hit 46 last year. The year before last he knocked in 131 runs. He wears No. 20. And, yeah, has missed 24 games in his big-league life.
Cohen wants his Mets to be new and different. Not if he loses Alonso, whether Cohen’s head gets turned by Soto at the end of this season or not, when Soto will be a free agent, too. Cohen grew up a Mets fan. His birthday is June 11. It means he had turned 21 four days before the Mets traded Seaver away in 1977. No one is saying Alonso is Seaver. No one the Mets have ever had is Seaver. Alonso is just the biggest star the Mets have now, and most popular. And he is theirs, at least for now. He is their Judge. The Yankees couldn’t afford to lose Judge. Cohen can’t afford to lose Pete Alonso. And can sure afford to pay him what he’s worth. Sooner rather than later. Or when it’s too late.
PAINT THE TOWN RANGERS BLUE, LEBRON IS STILL THE KING & RICHARD LEWIS WILL BE MISSED …
The Rangers are the best team in town.
It has been a long time since they were the best team in town, 10 years ago, back when they made that run to the Stanley Cup finals before losing a tough, tough series to the Los Angeles Kings.
The Knicks have fallen back lately, in what has been such an entertaining winter season at the Garden.
The Rangers, though, they just keep coming.
The Yankees fell down last year, the Mets fell down, the Jets fell down, the Giants fell down.
You can’t even find the Brooklyn Nets.
There was, of course, another time when the Rangers were the best team in town, and famously.
Another year that ended with a “4.”
That would be 1994.
When can I call off the prayer vigil for Scott Boras’ remaining unsigned clients?
LeBron had another one of those games and one of those nights this week, bringing the Lakers all the way back against the Clippers, when he clearly forgot what year it is.
Then he came back and did it again the next night against the Wizards, when the Lakers won in overtime.
And reminded everybody again that as hot a property as people still seem to think the NBA is, the league is still at its best and most compelling when he’s in the gym.
I love Steph Curry, don’t get me wrong.
And knew he we would show up the way he did at the Garden this week, in what felt like a one-night-only New York performance against the Knicks.
Curry has won as many titles as LeBron has.
It doesn’t change that LeBron, when he’s playing the way he’s been playing lately, really is still The King.
Put me down as someone who always thought that big-time college athletes always deserved to share in the riches they were bringing in for their schools, and their sports.
But the only difference between the current world of college sports and the old one we’re seeing now is that now it’s not just the schools and the networks acting like pigs.
By the way?
As soon as they take the playoffs to 12 teams, they’re already talking about 14 and if you think they’re going to stop there, send up a flare.
The transfer portal has turned college football especially into a traveling circus, and created a system where coaches don’t just have to recruit players out of high school, they have to recruit players they’ve already recruited, every single year.
Richard Lewis, who died the other day, was, to use a phrase he liked, one “amazing cat.”
He and Larry David, with whom Richard appeared in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” were born three days apart in the same Brooklyn hospital, and were dear and lifelong friends.
Richard was a terrific stand-up comic, he was a terrific actor.
He got sober more than 30 years ago, would end up battling Parkinson’s with grace.
And was so thoroughly and completely enjoying the second — or third, or fourth — act that he got with “Curb.”
Playing a part he was born to play.
Himself.
He will be missed.
