Pete Alonso’s departure is the microcosm of all that went wrong last winter

Plus - the Mets lost in appropriate fashion on Tuesday as Alonso’s 300th career homer tied the game and ultimately sank them

What’s Up with the Mets? ⚾️

• The Mets dropped Pete Alonso’s homecoming series to the Orioles, falling to Baltimore 7-5 in extra innings (box)

• The Mets took a 3-2 lead in the third and maintained it up until Alonso hit his long-awaited 300th career homer off RHP Kodai Senga to tie the game in the ninth, receiving a raucous Citi Field response

• LHP Sean Manaea surrendered two homers in the second inning but not much more, allowing two runs on four hits while striking out six over 5.1 innings

• LF Juan Soto and 3B Bo Bichette each tallied multiple hits and drove in a pair of runs between them; Bichette had a tough day on the basepaths, though, getting picked off/caught stealing in the fifth

• RF Carson Benge hit his 18th homer of the year; he has 11 games left to reach the 20-20 milestone

• 1B Jared Young continued to make the best of his increased playing time with a double, a sac fly, and an unassisted double play

• RHP Austin Warren and LHP Nate Lavender retired eight straight batters behind Manaea; Lavender had a particularly strong relief outing, striking out four of the five batters he faced in a scoreless 1.2-inning appearance

• The game ended on a heartbreaking whimper, as the Orioles scored the winning three runs on a two-strike, two-out inside-the-park homer from Coby Mayo following a misplayed ball by CF A.J. Ewing

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Play of the Game 🙃

As if it was going to happen any other way.

In the top of the ninth, with his new team down 3-2, Pete Alonso stepped into the box to face Kodai Senga with both the game and history on the line.

On the 2-0 pitch, Alonso smoked one of Senga’s signature ghost forks into the left-field bleachers, parking his 300th career homer in a spot we’ve seen him hit to so many times before.

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The Just Mets Podcast 🎙️

ICYMI: Andrew went solo to recap the latest edition of the Subway Series before engaging in a lively chat with Knicks Film School’s Shawn (with a W) about Juan Soto.

SUBSCRIBE: YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

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Down on the Farm 🌾

• SS Jefferson Rojas (No. 1 prospect, Triple-A): 2-for-5, HR, 2 R, 2 RBI, 3 K

• DH Vidal Brújan (Triple-A): 3-for-4, 2B, 4 RBI, BB, SB

• 3B Ronny Mauricio (Triple-A): 2-for-5, 2B, R, RBI

• LF Ryan Clifford (Triple-A): 2-for-4, 2B, 2 R

BOX SCORES

Triple-A SYR

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Today’s Game 🗓

Match-up: Mets (69-82) vs. Orioles (74-78)

Where: Citi Field - Flushing, NY

Starters: RHP Robert Stock (1-3, 5.93 ERA) vs. RHP Chris Bassitt (7-5, 4.88 ERA)

When: 7:10 PM EDT

Where to Watch: SNY

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Pete Alonso’s departure is the perfect summary for what went wrong for the Mets ✍️

NY Post

I have been a Mets fan for a very long time. Not as long as some of you, but long enough to have been actively engaged with the goings-on of this franchise for a little less than half of its lifespan. I remember Pete Alonso’s rookie season vividly, just like all of you. I watched his journey from heavy-hitting prospect to all-time franchise home run leader, just like all of you.

And last night, I, just like you, watched the entirety of Citi Field cheer for him to hit his 300th homer in a situation that directly took a win, however meaningless, away from the team he used to call his.

I obviously don’t begrudge Pete his moment. It was tremendously important and one that fans have been waiting for since the moment he established himself as a preeminent masher…but did last night not feel just a little bit weird?

Let me pause right away: maybe ‘weird’ isn’t the right word. To be clear, I don’t mean to use ‘weird’ in a negative way, but ‘bittersweet’ doesn’t feel quite right, nor does ‘bizarre’ — forgive me, my thesaurus is here somewhere. Perhaps I’m just too young, or not as well-versed in baseball history as I thought, but I cannot ever recall seeing a vibe quite like the one that’s been on display from Mets fans at Citi Field the last few days.

I’ll cop to maybe viewing the moment too narrowly given the context of Alonso’s career (a milestone homer will almost always outweigh a low stakes late September win in terms of tangible historical weight), and far be it from me to tell other fans how to celebrate a beloved former player. But I do think the optics are worth acknowledging, because I don’t think there’s any other moment from this season that could better encapsulate for David Stearns just how high the stakes are going to be in 2027.

AP Photo-Seth Wenig

Despite a horrific start to the season that all but drained playoff hopes as early as June, the Mets have played above-.500 baseball since Andy Green took the helm. Obviously, the preseason presumption was that they’d be buyers at the trade deadline, but post-fire sale this team owns a 22-14 record. They boast two consensus top-four NL Rookie of the Year candidates, with several other rookies contributing on a regular if not daily basis, and though they’re already well-entrenched in a long-foretold Youth Movement that arrived earlier than expected, the results have been arguably better than anticipated. There’s ample stuff to root for, and most Mets fans are acutely aware of it all.

And yet, they still chose to root for the team’s downfall in a few very specific, contextually relevant instances during this one-of-a-kind series, raining boo’s on a rookie for walking an opponent and cheering for said opponent to tie a ballgame late, specifically to stick it to someone who doesn’t set foot on the field. I hope that resonates loudly with the fan-turned-franchise leader.

Pete Alonso should probably still be a Met. Most everyone except for a handful of front office executives and a few apologists for the front office feel that way. Instead, Pete Alonso is a Baltimore Oriole, and will be for the foreseeable future. By all accounts, he’s happy there, and I wish him nothing but continued health and success in his new home. None of that is up for debate or discussion this morning…but my goodness is it jarring to see an entire home crowd rooting for the opposition in a ninth-inning, game-on-the-line situation. It’s hilariously backwards, in a way that’s unqiuely befitting Mets culture, but it’s also something I’d like to see shift rather drastically and rather swiftly, for the sake of the fans and the players.

I believe that shift starts with Stearns.

AP Photo-Seth Wenig

Now, a lot of next season’s moves will be naturally be informed by whatever happens with the CBA. and there are significant Rule 5 decisions to make (Rojas, Jack Wenninger, Ryan Clifford, Jacob Reimer, Chris Suero, Jose Chirinos, Matt Turner, Gary Gill Hill), so more change is inevitable for this team. The hope is that Stearns has learned that changing literally everything in one fell swoop yields some rocky results, and that both the intangibles and the obvious deserve some deference in the decision-making process. I love numbers as much as the next nerd (non-derogatory), but even stubborn ol’ me will concede that sometimes it’s okay to eat some money later down the line if a homegrown fan favorite is getting a little old and slow.

I promised myself I wouldn’t reference any cold hard stats today, so I’m going to cheat by framing them as a Fun Fact:

• This is the first season in franchise history in which 11 different Mets have hit at least 10 runs. Point: Analytics

• Pete Alonso has hit 36 homers and 101 RBI in 152 games for the Orioles. The Mets’ 620 RBI in 2026 ranks eighth-fewest in MLB — adding Pete’s total would boost them all the way up to fourth-most in baseball, ahead of the Dodgers by a considerable margin. Point: Inevitability

(To be fair, the Nationals have driven in 737 runs as a team and sit 10 games below .500, but you get the very clear point I’m making — Pete would have helped the Mets this year.)

I don’t know what David Stearns is plotting for this winter, but if there’s any lesson to have been learned from the past calendar year, it would appear to be this: stick with what works. It sounds painfully simple, because it is. He didn’t do that with his acquisitions last winter. We aren’t getting into this in detail at this point - we all know he signed a bunch of expensive players, took what turned out to be a Hail Mary shot and stuck them at new positions, and pretty much all but one of those worked out, albeit in a topsy turvy season (Bo Bichette).

Carson Benge and A.J. Ewing are the clear future of the outfield; the core of a homegrown rotation is already in place in Nolan McLean, Christian Scott, and Zac Thornton; multiple infielders are emerging on the farm as clear spring invite contenders at bare minimum…between the young talent and the vets that still have quite a bit of roadmap left with the franchise, all the pieces are here to make a run in not a long amount of time.

Much will be made about players the Mets need to add in this offseason in order to make a legitimate championship push — make sure you get your daily dose of Skubal rumors, y’all — but I’d contend that there really isn’t as much to do to bring this team back to life as has been suggested. If you watch this team regularly, I think you’d agree that their 22-14 post-deadline record doesn’t feel like a fluke. The guts of a winning club are there, and most of what’s been presented can be maximized by putting the right support around them.

Alonso’s departure is the perfect summary for what went wrong for the Mets this past winter: in an effort to shake up the system at large, they chose to stray entirely from what still worked. And while some of that aggressive change will hopefully prove beneficial to the team long-term (even tangentially), it’s incumbent upon the front office to ensure that this specific cautionary tale doesn’t get a sequel.

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Around the League 🚩

• The Brewers sealed their fourth straight NL Central title behind another scoreless outing from Jacob Misiorowski; his ERA is now just 1.89, and he’s tallied 243 strikeouts, both best in baseball - the Brewers beat the Pirates 5-1

• Junior Caminero hammered the first walk-off homer of his career in a 2-1 win over the A’s

• The Guardians beat the White Sox 7-6 on a walk-off double from Brayan Rocchio to pull within 1/2 game of first place in the AL Central

• Yoshinobu Yamamoto looked like his World Series MVP self, allowing just one hit while racking up seven K’s in a scoreless seven-inning performance as the Dodgers shut the Reds out 4-0