New York Mets owner Steve Cohen told reporters on Wednesday that first baseman Pete Alonso was one of the individual players he met with during the team’s decision to go full fire sale ahead of this season’s trade deadline.
“We love Pete as a Met,” he said. “He’s an integral part of the Mets. He’s still with us for another year. We hope we work things out. Even with [Brandon Nimmo], we worked things out in free agency. Hopefully, we get a few shots at the apple and try to figure it out.”
The 28-year-old Alonso is only under club control for one more season before he becomes eligible to become a free agent ahead of the 2025 campaign.
“What I will say is Pete is a great Met,” Cohen said when asked if the Mets would try to extend Alonso this offseason, adding he’d keep those discussions private.
Alonso continues to be one of the most consistent sluggers in the game, hitting .220 this season with 31 homers, 77 RBI, 60 runs and a .827 OPS. He was an All-Star selection for the third time this season.
Alonso hit the ground running in 2019 in his first season with the Mets, blasting 53 homers to go along with 120 RBI. That earned him NL Rookie of the Year honors, and he’s continued to slug from there, with 37 dingers in 2021 and 40 homers and a career-high 131 RBI last season.
Alongside Francisco Lindor, he’s one of the foundational pieces remaining on the Mets after an epic fire sale at the deadline that saw them move Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, Tommy Pham and David Robertson, among others.
It was an indication that Cohen and the front office weren’t going to sit around and hope the struggling Mets turned things around.
“If you’re going to have a 12 percent chance of winning—just getting into the playoffs—those are pretty crummy odds,” Cohen told reporters Wednesday. “I wouldn’t want to be betting any money on that. I don’t think anybody else would, either. I said before, hope is not a strategy.”
The question is where that leaves a core player like Alonso going forward. Cohen and the team’s front office has indicated that 2024 is going to be something of a transition year, but it’s hard to imagine that lasting beyond one season.
“I think the expectations were really high this year. And my guess is next year it’ll be a lot lower,” Cohen said. “I don’t want to roll a team out there we’re going to be embarrassed by. But we also know that spending a fortune doesn’t guarantee you a trip to the playoffs.”
Stars help get you into October, however, and keeping Alonso would make sense for the team’s long-term plans to compete for titles. Whether the slugger is interested in remaining with the team remains to be seen.
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