Despite walk-year pressure, Alonso set to tackle season like a joyful kid
PORT ST. LUCIE — It’s the Other Stuff that will accompany Pete Alonso to the ballpark this year, no matter how many times he insists he’ll keep the baseball and business elements of his life separate. That is the Walk Year Shuffle, and we’ve seen it eat some players whole, and we’ve seen it elevate others to remarkable heights.
We saw Aaron Judge have maybe the greatest walk year of all time two years ago, all the way to 62 home runs and a $360 million contract. And we’ve seen that Alonso has a knack of calling Judge’s bets and raising them. He did that with the all-time rookie home-run mark five years ago. He does that now, betting on himself, as Judge once did.
The Mets, probably unwittingly, provide their own daily reminder of the Other Stuff inside their spring training clubhouse at Clover Field. Around the spacious room, above every locker, are huge black-and-white images of the cream of their alumni association, Dwight Gooden and Jerry Koosman, Mike Piazza and David Wright all captured in their youthful glory.
Immediately above Alonso’s locker? Darryl Strawberry. Just to the right of Straw? Tom Seaver. If you believe that the Mets re-proved George Santayana’s old baseball adage — those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it — when they let Strawberry walk 14 years after trading Seaver, it’s hard not to wonder if they just enjoy torturing themselves with all the symbolism.
For now, Alonso is a Met. He remains the larger-than-life presence in the room, on the field, in the batting order. He still talks the way he talked as a wide-eyed kid in the spring of ’19 when he hit his way onto the big club out of Florida, kept hitting all across the summer, finally reaching 53 home runs, the most of any rookie since baseball first went into business in 1869, looking like he was having a blast every day, in addition to hitting a blast every day. Looking that way still. “It’s a whole-body sensation,” Alonso said Thursday, when he was asked what, exactly, it feels like to hit a baseball on the screws, to send it flying out toward the second deck, so high it seems like it might take a spin around the sun (or the moon) first. “To hit a ball like that in a game, in a stadium full of people, it’s such an adrenaline rush. It’s addicting, something I hope to do for a really long time.”
Alonso has said repeatedly that he hopes that time frame means Queens, means Citi Field, means becoming the kind of Met-for-life perennial All-Star only Wright has ever really been. On the clubhouse wall, just to the right of Seaver, is Ed Kranepool, another Mets first baseman, one who played every inning and all 1,853 games of his career in a Mets uniform.
Alonso would need 1,169 games to catch Kranepool. That’s about 7 ½ years. There aren’t many Mets fans alive — if any — who wouldn’t sign up for that immediately. For he is to Mets fans at this hour what Judge is to Yankees fans, what Jalen Brunson is to Knicks fans. He is the franchise face in addition to its beating heart. He sells tickets and he sells hope, in a way that only players that hit baseballs that far really can.
“That’s what it’s all about is winning games,” he said. “It’s like when there’s a walk-off celebration. Baseball is a funny game because it encapsulates so much. You have super young guys in their 20s all the way up to guys who are 40, and when you win a game in the bottom of the ninth it’s a bunch of men acting like kids out there.”
It’s when Alonso talks that you see the starkest difference between himself and the ghostly apparitions above his lockers. By the end Seaver had become embittered with Mets’ management, especially M. Donald Grant, and when he was traded he wept bitter tears but all but sprinted to Cincinnati.
Strawberry had picked Game 1 of the 1988 NLCS to first speak openly about how nice it would be to play in L.A., this with two years still left on his Mets contract. Frank Cashen made him own those words, then offered up his own regrettably edible sound byte by saying no ballplayer — let alone Strawberry — was worth $5 million. Strawberry fled.
Alonso still talks like a kid on the make, not a veteran who’ll make $20.5 million this year, who’s won a Rookie of the Year and two Home Run Derbies, who’s made three all-star teams and hit 192 home runs. When he talks about the short memory needed to succeed at the game, he goes with the ol’ reliable from Ted Lasso. “Be a goldfish,” he said. By season’s end, he may be something else. He needs 29 homers to pass Piazza for third on the Mets’ all-rime home run list, 51 to slip past Wright for No. 2. To catch Strawberry? He’ll either need to hit 61 of them this year, or stick around long enough to make the record his own next year and for years to come, and maybe forever. Mets fans would be giddy with the 61.
Though they’d probably prefer if he gets it next year.