Maybe this excites you. Maybe you think it’s gross. Either way, it’s a solid move.
Last week, Pete Alonso’s long national nightmare finally ended, as the Mets brought back their home grown first baseman on a two-year, $54 million deal with an opt-out. It was a protracted negotiation process, with both sides voicing frustration at various points. Ultimately, though, Alonso returns to his spot at the cold corner and at the heart of the Mets’ lineup.
This deal is definitely something of a surprise at this juncture. Alonso infamously turned down a 7-year, $158 million deal in 2023, a contract that would’ve been well above market and almost immediately one of the worst deals in baseball (thank you, Billy Eppler). He then hired Scott Boras, who has repeatedly made references to Mark Teixeira’s and Prince Fielder’s contracts while discussing Alonso. Simply put, investing that level of money in an aging, right-right first baseman is not in David Stearns’ playbook, and the Mets had seemingly moved on by re-signing Jesse Winker.
On the other hand, it’s really no surprise at all. To call Alonso’s market weak would be an understatement, with seemingly only two teams—the desperate Blue Jays and the Mets—making him a real offer at any point this offseason. And while the Mets could likely have aggregated decent first base production from their current crop of internal options (Brett Baty, Jared Young, Ronny Mauricio) and/or a buy-low trade (Spencer Torkelson), the level of certainty that Alonso provides does have some level of value.
Let’s talk about exactly what that production looks like, and fair warning this will have a negative slant. Alonso is the kind of hitter that many fans will overrate based on big home run and RBI totals; over the last two seasons he’s tallied 80 long balls and 206 RBIs, numbers surpassed only by superstars like Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, and new teammate Juan Soto. The reality, however, is that the sum total of Alonso’s production is more good than great. He’s checked in right around 20% better than league average by wRC+ in each of the last two seasons. Baseball Prospectus’s DRC+ and Baseball Savant’s xWOBA, meanwhile, liked his 2023 a bit more, but came to a similar conclusion in 2024.
I won’t go so far as to say that the underlying causes of Alonso’s post-2022 decline are obvious, but they are there if you know where to look. His strikeout rate has increased, still lower than his early-career marks but also clearly trending up from his 2020-2021 peak. His rate of pulled fly balls has gone from 14.6% in 2022 to 12.1% in 2023 and 11.3% in 2024. His ground ball rate jumped by 6% between 2023 and 2024, mostly at the cost of fly balls. He’s swinging less, often a leading-indicator of age-related decline as hitters recognize they can’t get to certain pitches anymore.
A lot of those factors would point to a player with declining bat speed, but that’s actually not the case for Alonso, whose bat speed and exit velocities have remained near the top of the league. Before throwing out the other data though, consider two counter points; first, we only have swing data for the last two seasons. With one more season I highly suspect we’d see a significant drop off in bat speed between 2022 and 2023. Second, let’s take a look at Alonso’s performance against select pitch types. In 2024, he posted his best performance against fastballs (four-seams in particular) since his rookie season; 1.70 runs above average per 100 pitches, per Fangraphs. By contrast, he posted far and away his worst ever performance against sliders; -1.11 runs above average per 100 pitches. It’s not direct evidence, but that sure looks like a guy cheating to regain proficiency against hard stuff but opening up a new vulnerability against anything soft.
There’s more to dig into here that isn’t as easily accessible (for instance, the success Alonso found in the postseason by ignoring any fastball on the inner-half) including plenty of more sophisticated metrics not available to us on the public side. We’ve got the broad strokes though; Alonso is still a good hitter, but is ultimately a player in decline, one w/ a skill set that his historically aged poorly. Combine that with his disastrous 1B defense (another negative aging marker in-and-of itself, not to mention a drag on roster construction) and you’ve reconstructed the argument for moving on.
Prior to his all-time moment in Milwaukee and generally strong postseason, this line of thinking was internalized by wide swaths of the fan base. Coupled with Alonso’s relatively unsympathetic position (has already earned 8-figures, losing out on money due to poor choices rather than cheap owners) and many had already accepted that this reunion was not going to occur. Correspondingly, it was easy to side with the team throughout the negotiating process, further deepening the belief that the team was better off letting Alonso walk. Doubling back on that after months of internalization is difficult, and may leave a bad taste in the mouth.
Perhaps the best way to wash that taste away is to focus on the good aspects of this move. At least for 2025, Alonso should be a valuable contributor; PECOTA expects a 127 wRC+ and 3.2 WARP, with most of Fangraphs’ projections expecting similar figures. The Mets also avoided nearly any risk here given the structure of the contract since Alonso is highly likely to opt-out after this season if he hits his projected numbers. If the decline we fear comes quicker than expected and he winds up opting in, well the Mets are only on the hook for $24M in 2026. That’s a cost you can eat, not a crippling long-term obligation.
Maybe that’s enough for you. Maybe it isn’t. Or maybe you don’t care about this in the first place and just wanted to bring back the home grown dinger hitter and didn’t think any further than that. Whatever the case, the Mets objectively came out on top here, signing a flawed, declining, but still good player to a low-risk, short term deal at a position of need. It’s a solid B+ move, even if it might feel a bit worse.