Mets’ looming Pete Alonso decision will be a hard one | The Show

Mets’ looming Pete Alonso decision will be a hard one | The Show

Joel Sherman for three things here. Uh the Mets and Yankees are going to be at the center as you would expect. The free agency for a bunch of reasons and a big one is who the two teams have as free agents uh this off season and do they keep them? Do they let them go? What are the cost? And uh so we thought uh it would be worth a series to kind of go one at a time with the key people. Uh and we’re going to begin today with Pete Alonzo. Uh so number one in three things let’s make the case for Pete Alonzo if you’re in New York especially for Met fan you know the easiest case he is as good a power hitter just about as there is in the sport if you want to say judge and Otani and Schwabber he’s right there it is number four at the worst uh consistently for power he’s one of the most durable players in the sport he now plays 162 games regularly he is coming off a strong platform year. Last year, he had his lowest OPS plus uh in 2024 uh and he had the qualifying offer on him and it really chilled his marketplace. Uh this time around, he’s uh coming off about a 143 OPS plus. Uh he doesn’t have the qualifying offer, which comes with draft pick compensation to it. He was second in the major leagues in RBI’s. He was eighth in homers. He was third in doubles. He had a very very strong offensive year. He’s not only one of the most popular Mets right now, you could argue he’s top five all time in popularity with the fan base. Only made more so because he became the all-time home run leader uh for the organization over the course of the 2025 season. You have to play the game. If not him, who this would have been an easier argument a year ago. Uh Mark Ventos was coming off a strong season. Maybe you could believe he could play first. Uh that’s a harder sell today. Can the Mets actually for the second straight year uh take somebody a free agent, a big free agent that the Yankees want to keep away from them? Juan Sodto last year. Cody Bellinger can play first base or center field where the Mets need some help, but he could come. The next two best first baseman are Josh Naylor and Ryan O’Harn. Both lefty hitters. Uh that is that good enough? There are players coming from Asia. uh Munetta Murakami, Kazumo Okamoto, and there’s a Korean star uh Bako Kang who are coming. You know, there’s obviously mystery around those kind of players. Uh the last part of this I would uh you know, just point out is Kyle Schwarber is supposed to kill it this off season as probably he should, right? He he’s such a good hitter. Uh if you look at him and Alonzo over the last four years, uh they st Alonzo stands up to him uh as a as an overall hitter, they both have 134 ops plus. Alonzo’s war is actually a little better. Their slash lines are very similar. Uh and Alonz and Schwarber, I mean, I think the baseline for Schwarber is probably four years at 150 million. That’s 35 million a year. Alonzo would probably have the right to say if he gets that much, I’m two years younger. Why don’t I get at least that much if not more? Uh the top of the Met lineup is their strength. Uh Sodto, Lindor, and Alonzo. And at a time, uh where you don’t want to uh break up strengths, do you really want to let it go? So, let’s go to number two. Why would you even think about it? Uh Alonzo does one thing well on defense. He scoops balls, but he just had his worst defensive season of his career, and he was never a very good overall defender. His throwing has always been a problem. It was worse this year. Uh he had at least always he’s range challenged, but when the ball was hit at him, it was pretty much a sure out. That was less so this year. He seemed more uncertain with the ball than in uh previous years. Uh you know, he turns 31 in December. Uh he uh you know, the the marketplace didn’t like him last year because he was a righty hitter, righty thrower, bad athlete, bad defender who was 30. He’s 31 now and even coming off the platform year, it isn’t like the industry is suddenly going to say we like that profile. That profile is not liked around Major League Baseball. Uh Schwabber comparatively lefty hitter, 56 homers last year. And while Pete is wellliked in his clubhouse, Schwabber is looked at as one of the top leaders in the sport. That’s something that Pete wouldn’t bring uh at his press conference to end the season. David Sterns is not somebody who throws things out willy-nilly. He repeated over and over and over again that a key element this off season is quote unquote run prevention. And quite frankly, if you have Alonzo on your team and Juan Sodto and they’re playing the field simultaneously, it’s hard to have that. The Mets are also locked long-term into Brandon NMO who is down at least a grade in left field and Francisco Lindor who is down a grade at shortstop. uh you keep adding gears and money with players who are on the wrong side of their defense and two players in Sodto and Alonzo who have never been good defenders. It’s hard to get to uh run prevention uh you know in that in that situation. So where does that leave us for number three? If you’re advising David Sterns and Steve Conn, look, uh I think Alonzo with a without the qualifying offer and off of the good platform and with teams needing offense the way they do, uh he’s clearly going to opt out of the 24 million he’s owed in 2026. And he’s going to go into a marketplace that I think is going to treat him better than it was treated last year. I think left to his own devices, David Sterns would not bring this player back. Uh it is not, again, he believes in the profiles and 31-year-old right-hand thrower, right-hand hitter, non-athlete, bad defender is not what he would get married to long term, especially when he knows the shape of the rest of his team. Does Steve Con step in? Does the fan base screaming matter here? David Sterns was hired to make unemotional decisions. Does Cohen let him make an unemotional decision here? He could point out that Alex Rodriguez uh left the uh Mariners as a free agent and the Mariners won 116 games the following year. Bryce Harper left the Nationals after 2018. The Nationals without him won the World Series in 2019. Juan Sto left the Yankees last year and joined the Mets. The Yankees this year, I know they didn’t get to the World Series, but if you watch them play, they they won the same 94 games without Sodto that they won with him. And uh they they they were at least as good a team as the year before and I would argue better overall. And it’s a point to just point out, you could lose great players in their prime. All those players were better than Pete Alonzo is now. By the way, they have a similarity. Those players at the time of their free agency were all represented by Scott Boris. So is Pete Alonzo. And Pete Alonzo went to Boris for a reason, to kind of break the bank. The Mets offered a seven-year $158 million extension midway through the 2023 season to Alonzo. That would have covered his last year of arbitration in six free agent years. Since then, Alonzo’s earned $50.5 million over two years. So, if you think about it, he’s going to want at least what, five at 107.5. He wants to kill that. Like, he doesn’t just want to equal that. He wants to do way better than that to justify going to Boris, not taking that amount of money. Can the Mets get there? They could. If Steve Cohen just decides, hey, I don’t care when he’s a bad player. We’ll just eat what’s ever left. One of the executives I talked to for this series said, remember Tiger fans loved the signing the extension of Miguel Cabrera on the day he was signed, but then he became an albat albatross for about the last four or five years of that contract. Then the fans are like, “What’s he doing here? Why can’t we do more? Steve Con with his money, I guess, could ignore that. I think Con and the Mets should try to say to Alonzo, hey, we’ll make you by far the highest paid perom first baseman ever. Two at 70, 35 million would be the most. Two at a three at 100 would be the most. I think that Alonzo would reject that and go for the bigger dollar. Do the Mets and Cohen actually have the ability to turn away because they’re worried about what 28, 28, 29, 30 would look like with him on the team and some of these other aging players on the team all needing DH time and the rules kind of still being the same that you can only play one DH at a time. It would be very very unpopular today. Can Steve Conn and David Sterns do something very very unpopular today for the very very big picture?

Joel Sherman’s three things for October 24th, 2025 cover whether the Mets should attempt to re-sign Pete Alonso or letting him walk if the All-Star first baseman’s price is too much for president of baseball operaions David Stearns to be comfortable with.

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