Pete Alonso wears his heart on the sleeve of his Mets jersey. It’s evident for all to see in the way he plays baseball, especially at Citi Field.

So when Kodai Senga went down with a hamstring strain after trying to catch a high throw from the first baseman on Thursday in a 4-3 win over the Washington Nationals, Alonso blamed himself for an injury that is expected to land Senga on the injured list.

“It just sucks. I mean, it sucks to be involved in that,” Alonso said. “I mean, Senga, he’s one of our guys, he’s one of our guys here. You hate to see anyone go down and yeah, I just… It sucks being a part of that.”

In the top of the sixth, Alonso fielded a chopper off the first base bag from Luis Garcia Jr. Senga went to cover first base and called for the ball, but Alonso’s throw went high and the right-hander had to jump to make the catch, and get down quickly without blocking Garcia’s path to the bag.

Getting full extension on the jump, Senga made the catch and tagged the bag for the second out in the inning, but he grabbed at his right hamstring as his momentum carried him toward the dugout, where he tumbled forward in pain. Alonso rushed over and knelt down next to Senga as he was attended to by the trainers, looking pained himself.

“The ball took me in the hole, and I think it was Garcia who hit it, and he’s a pretty good runner, so I was just trying to just get rid of the ball as quick as I could and as accurately as I could,” Alonso said. “I mean, the throw was good because it was over the base, but obviously too high. He made an unbelievable play — an unbelievable catch. But, I mean, yeah, I just wish it didn’t happen.”

The infield consoled a visibly shaken Alonso while left-hander Jose Castillo warmed up on the mound. Manager Carlos Mendoza talked to him in the dugout after the inning, reassuring him that it wasn’t his fault. Senga himself wanted to reassure his teammate, sending his translator, Hiro Fujiwara to the dugout to talk to Alonso.

Fujiwara relayed the message that it was the step right before the throw where Senga felt the hamstring pull at him. Yet Alonso couldn’t shake the awful feeling that he had contributed to an injury to the club’s ace.

“It still doesn’t change the fact how I feel,” Alonso said. “And I’m sure [it doesn’t change] how he feels right now.”

The 30-year-old first baseman put a heavy emphasis on improving his first base defense over the offseason and during the 2025 season. His Outs Above Average, a metric to measure how many outs a player has saved, was a career-worst -9 last season, and this year it’s -3. Alonso makes some incredibly difficult picks, but felt that he needed to “take care of the baseball” better when it came to some of his throws.

His flip to Senga was exactly the type of mistake he’s been trying to eliminate.

After the game, he was scribbling furiously in his journal, something he does after good games and bad. Teammates stopped to check in on him, just as they did shortly after the play. It was tough for the entire team to see Senga injured again, since the ace spent nearly the entirety of last season on the injured list.

First, it was a shoulder injury, then it was a left calf strain in his first game of the season last July. Oddly enough, that injury also occurred in the sixth inning with one out.

But with the way Alonso owns his emotions, there might not be anything that anyone can say in this situation that would alleviate his guilt.

“I’m appreciative of their support, for sure, but I mean, it still doesn’t change the result of the play, you know?” he said. “I mean, yeah, OK, whatever, we got the out; but at what cost? So, yeah, it doesn’t feel good, you know? I mean, I know it’s the innocence of just trying to make a play, and yeah, obviously things happen on the baseball field…

“I just wish it didn’t happen.”