Look, I understand that you can make a case for the Mets to trade Pete Alonso. I do. There are any number of new-age baseball justifications that can be slapped together to back you up if that’s how you feel.
Alonso’s profile as a power-hitting first baseman isn’t as coveted as it was even a few years ago. Check.
You can worry that he might not age well. Check.
He’s an asset who would likely return a tidy haul of prospects at a time when the Mets are committed to building their farm system into a sustainable power. Check.
Steve Cohen is going to pay David Stearns upwards of $10 million a year for his vision and version of the Mets, and Stearns has no ties whatsoever to Alonso. Check.
You could argue all of those points.
And you might even be right.
But it says here the Mets need to keep Alonso. It says here that the first order of postseason business — and therefore the first order of the Stearns Era — should be to lock up Alonso long term, to make sure that, at the least, the first 450 or so home runs of Alonso’s career will be launched as a Met, to make Alonso himself the cornerstone of the Mets’ core to come, rather than whatever so-far nameless kids might be swapped in return.
Is Alonso a perfect player? He’s not. Even he would tell you there are areas in which he would like to improve. He can come across as a little goofy sometimes. His various slumps this year were public agonistes. All of that is true. All of that is fair.
But so is this:
Alonso is one of the most popular Mets of all time. He is a classic home-run hitter and projects to be one for a while, and that still has an appeal — or should have an appeal — even in a game that now sometimes seems overrun by adding machines and “Good Will Hunting” blackboard math.
And as the years pass, Mets fans crave players they can believe will be lifelong Mets. As we discussed in this space last year, that is a shockingly small list. David Wright is a consensus No. 1, and a worthy one. Ed Kranepool is 2, an Original Met who has been a fine face of the franchise almost from the very beginning. And No. 3 is almost certainly … Ron Hodges, who spent every one of his 666 career at-bats as a catcher backing up Jerry Grote, Duffy Dyer, John Stearns, Junior Ortiz and Mike Fitzgerald.
OK. Now, Stearns may be a lifelong Mets fan, which makes this a cute story, but Cohen didn’t hire him because he may have worn a Rico Brogna jersey to Shea Stadium back in the day. He hired him for his baseball acumen. And the fact is, there probably are — and should be — two red warning flags to all of this.
Eleven years ago, the very same arguments could have been used — and were used, by your humble narrator — to insist that Wright be re-signed. And from 30,000 feet, even factoring in his feel-good part of the 2015 run to the World Series, it’s hard to say that was the best long-term baseball decision, given what happened to him.
A GM has a lot to consider when assessing a roster. Making sure a player spends his whole career in one place isn’t even in the top 500 things he can concern himself with. It would’ve been nice for Jacob deGrom to be one too, and how did that turn out?
Again, that’s fair.
But so is this:
There is an awfully good chance Alonso is going to hit 500 home runs in his career. At his current full-season average of 44 per, that would happen near the end of Year 7 of his next contract, or early in an eighth year, assuming good health (and even when it seemed Alonso was badly hurt this year, he was a remarkably quick healer). He’s a 100-RBI machine (and yes, I get it, in 2023 you sound older than Moses even saying the word “RBI”). But that’s still production that’s hard to replicate, let alone replace.
This isn’t just a bone to the fans. It would be a boon to the foundation of the team. The fact that you can accomplish both? It says here, the answer is obvious. Alonso needs to stay. If not for life, at least for a good, long while.