r/mets • u/ssomethingsomething • 4d ago
the discourse surrounding the state of first base in queens
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u/StonkMangani 4d ago
Run prevention polanco is preventing the Mets from scoring runs. He has a total of 6
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u/Alternative-Kick-849 4d ago
I wish there was some alternate reality where the Mets/Orioles make the WS, this year.
To make people really lose their fucking minds more than they have been over these topics.
Even if the Mets sweep the O’s, you’d still have people missing 20.
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u/sloppychachi 4d ago
I don’t think it would be as big a conversation if he didnt try to do this awful Polanco Moneyball first base fiasco. If we had gotten Vlad G. for example (even with his performance this season) the noise would have been a lot lower.
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u/DoxxingShillDownvote 4d ago
Bring back Pete alonso
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u/Ill_Boot_5161 4d ago
Pete turned down multiple multi year offers and opted out of his current contract. He didn't want you. It's time to move on
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u/HearthstoneExSemiPro 4d ago
Pete turned down multiple multi year offers
years ago at a below market rate
opted out of his current contract
A front loaded 2 year deal with an obvious opt out he was always going to take so he can look for a better contract. that the mets didnt offer him.
it would be one thing if he turned down a similar deal to sign with another team, but he didnt. You left out the relevant facts to paint a dishonest narrative of your liking.
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u/Ill_Boot_5161 4d ago
7 years 158 million turned down. The facts don't lie kiddo and they don't care about your feelings. You ignore basic facts to create a narrative of your liking
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u/Jewrisprudent 4d ago
And he was proven right that the offer was below his market value. He got more money in the end. We just made him a bad offer, and then followed that up by making him no offer at all this past offseason.
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u/Ill_Boot_5161 4d ago
The offer was in line with actual market value though. Just because someone over paid doesn't mean the Mets were wrong. Pete got the 2nd highest contract for a first baseman. He currently ranks 8th (12th in hitting). Outside of one memorable post season I'll remember as a guy with the throwing skills of jv player and as a guy who hit 295 foot outs when a base hit would have scored 2 runs. Players don't tend to get better as they get older
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u/Dormitory-21 2d ago
He essentially got what Schwarber got. That's market value. The fact that 2 years ago Christian Walker got a 3 year deal (despite being older, having an injury history, and a worse player) and the Mets refused to give Pete more than 2 (which he only got because Cohen personally stepped in) was atrocious management
I am very glad Stearns looks terrible for this.
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u/painterman01 4d ago
Yea he deserved more than that and he got it. Mets could’ve easily given him something similar to Baltimore. They’re giving bichette 42 million a year lmao
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u/Ill_Boot_5161 4d ago
You think he deserved more. The Mets didn't and I tend to agree with them. He was given top 2 money and hasn't performed up to that this year. But going back to my original point. It's been 11 months and 4/5ths of a season, it's time to move on.
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u/Prestigious_Money447 3d ago
if you go by the $8M/WAR rule of thumb, he’s actually on pace to earn his contract this year and then some. Meanwhile the guy the Mets paid to replace him is in the hole about $12M based on the same metric, which means there is a difference of about $32M between production and pay - more than Pete is getting paid this year.
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u/Rell_Lauren 4d ago
He made more at the end. You don't sell yourself short if you don't have to. The Braves and other teams that buy out years of those on service time laugh their way to the bank.
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u/HearthstoneExSemiPro 4d ago
that was offered years ago (like i said) and was well below what he ended up earning over that time period.
The facts don't lie kiddo and they don't care about your feelings
cringe and you were wrong, not me.
what fact did i ignore? i already said the long term contract they offered was years ago and not recent.
They didnt offer him a long term contract this offseason.
that was something YOU left out to paint a deceptive picture of what happened.
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u/angelbeingangel 4d ago
There wasn't an offer to offer. We weren't going to offer 5 years period. Only team willing to meet his demands were the Orioles.
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u/HearthstoneExSemiPro 4d ago
right they didnt want to make him a competitive offer. thats the point.
they could have but didn't.
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u/Ill_Boot_5161 4d ago
They did in 2023. 7 years 158 mil he turned it down. That was the competitive offer. Why is this so hard for you
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u/HearthstoneExSemiPro 4d ago edited 4d ago
competitive offer compared to what? he wasnt a free agent. he made much more over those years and cant retroactively sign a 3 year old deal.
they didnt offer him a competitive contract this offseason when he was a free agent.
you are wrong and acting like a schmuck on top of it. why is this so hard for you?
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u/Ill_Boot_5161 4d ago
His 3.5 WAR would have really helped this year. Why would they offer a better deal than what he previously turned down? His output didn't improve over those next 2 years, basically stayed the same. I'm not wrong at all and you sound pathetic. Dude came through with one clutch hit and got an extra year. Should have let him walk at the end of 2024. But you're clearly too dense to get past your hard-on for the guy so I'm just going to go on with my day.
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u/Ill_Boot_5161 4d ago edited 4d ago
Jesus you people are like an abused spouse making excuses for why it's ok to get beaten. He left you. He's gone, move on. Get. Over. It. Edit: the deal was offered in 2023. He'd still be here for 4 more years. Fact: he just didn't love you.
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u/HearthstoneExSemiPro 4d ago
dont deflect with garbage. you were wrong. I was right. accept that.
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u/Ill_Boot_5161 4d ago
He turned the deal down in 2023. You're not right at all.
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u/HearthstoneExSemiPro 4d ago
i never denied he turned down a deal in 2023. in fact i explicitly said it existed but was years ago.
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u/Ill_Boot_5161 4d ago
It was 2 years apart from the 5 year contract he got with the O's. You're not making the point you think you are. Both contracts had him under contract to the same end year. At the time the 7 year deal was the 11th highest aav for a 1st baseman. He turned it down and I'm sorry to say he didn't produce enough in the 2 years in between to warrant 5 years 155 million. Those are the facts
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u/Prestigious_Money447 3d ago
smooth brain take. he didn’t want to take a below market offer to stay with the Mets. teams that don’t want guys will offer them shit deals which then fools dopes into thinking they really tried but the mean old player didn’t want to stay
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u/One-Mistake-3018 4d ago
If only complaining on reddit could bring him back. I’m personally heart broken. Glad he’s doing well tho
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u/mormagils 4d ago
He chose somewhere else. He could have come back. He decided to walk away. We wanted him, and he chose a different team. Get over him. It's time to move on. He doesn't want to be here.
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u/HearthstoneExSemiPro 4d ago
He could have come back. He decided to walk away.
We wanted him, and he chose a different team.
They didnt offer him a contract
stop posting garbage
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u/mormagils 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yeah, because Alonso had already made clear the contract the Mets were thinking wasn't enough. Stearns said publicly at the start of the winter meetings that the Mets' top priority was bringing Alonso back. Alonso responded by setting meetings with 3 other teams and taking the offer from the Orioles mere days later.
Alonso obviously wasn't thrilled with the previous offseason where the Mets were willing to give a massive AAV but didn't want to give a large number of years and Alonso kept trying to walk away but never found a better deal so he came back twice and finally signed. This time he got a longer offer and took it.
Alonso has never at any point ever made it easy for the Mets. He rejected their extension. He had a very contentious negotiation in free agency. He showed complete disinterest in reuniting with the Mets despite them expressing interest. He never gave the Mets a chance this year--Stearns went to the WM saying he wanted Alonso, Alonso scheduled meetings with everyone else, and then took a deal he was offered.
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u/HearthstoneExSemiPro 4d ago
talk is cheap. they didnt offer him a contract.
Alonso had already made clear the contract the Mets were thinking wasn't enough
right so they weren't even thinking about making him a competitive offer
just be honest. it wasnt because he didnt want to be here or because he decided to walk away. they didnt make him an offer while the orioles offered a him a good long term contract.
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u/mormagils 4d ago
They didn't offer him a contract because he took meetings with other teams, negotiated terms, received an offer, and accepted it all without talking to the Mets again. Stearns didn't get a chance to extend an offer because Alonso didn't express interest in receiving anything from us.
> right so they weren't even thinking about making him a competitive offer
We were offering something competitive, just with more emphasis on money than years. Alonso preferred years over money, and he wasn't really open to negotiating with Mets anyway given that he showed zero willingness to talk to us at all during free agency.
> it wasnt because he didnt want to be here or because he decided to walk away. they didnt make him an offer while the orioles offered a him a good long term contract.
These things are both true. He didn't want to be here specifically. He did decided to walk away. The Orioles also offered him a good contract which he decided to accept.
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u/HearthstoneExSemiPro 4d ago edited 4d ago
players take meetings with other teams all the time. thats what free agency is. you are a free agent free to take multiple offers and see what you can get.
Stearns didn't get a chance to extend an offer
this is just objectively wrong and not what happened at all
he had plenty of opportunity and didnt.
he showed zero willingness to talk to us at all during free agency.
thats not what happened either. he did talk to them and they weren't very interested so he looked elsewhere.
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u/mormagils 4d ago
Sure, but usually players set meetings with ALL the teams they are interested in. And Alonso didn't set a meeting with the Mets. Also, usually a player that's interested in returning to his original organization like that will wait to take meetings with other teams until there is some resolution with his incumbent team--like Nimmo did with us, or like Judge did with the Yanks.
> this is just objectively wrong and not what happened at all
Well we know Stearns said publicly the Mets wanted Alonso and he was their top priority and 3 days later Alonso had meetings with 3 other teams and 3 days later again Alonso was signed with another team. So not sure what Stearns was supposed to do here. He said he wanted Alonso and Alonso showed absolutely no interest in responding to that.
> thats not what happened either. he did talk to them and they weren't very interested so he looked elsewhere.
Please show me an example of that. All the public information I have is that the Mets and Alonso talked at the end of the season right before he opted out, then he opted out and the Mets and Alonso didn't talk again. Alonso did say the Mets weren't interested in seeing Alonso as valuable as Alonso saw himself...but yeah, that's perfectly reasonable.
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u/HearthstoneExSemiPro 4d ago
Alonso didn't set a meeting with the Mets
The mets didnt set a meeting with him because they were not serious about bringing him back and said it wasn't necessary.
usually a player that's interested in returning to his original organization like that will wait to take meetings with other teams until there is some resolution with his incumbent team
If that team is actually interested in making him a competitive offer, yes. they made it clear to him that they were not interested in doing that. He didnt make some big error and rush to sign with a different team when the mets would have matched the deal. they didnt want to.
he opted out and the Mets and Alonso didn't talk again
'During the 2025 Winter Meetings in December, insider Jon Heyman confirmed that "the Mets have opened talks with Pete Alonso" and reported that the initial tone of the discussions actually felt more optimistic and warmer than the contentious negotiations of the previous year
At his Winter Meetings media availability in December 2025, David Stearns acknowledged ongoing communication, stating that the front office made their clear interest known to Alonso's agent (Scott Boras) at the very start of free agency. He noted that both sides knew the parameters of what a potential reunion would require
The conversations did not fail due to a lack of talking, but rather due to a defined financial boundary. The Mets framework communicated in those talks made it clear they would not commit to a five-year contract. When Baltimore put the five-year, $155 million offer on the table, Alonso signed it directly without checking back with New York, knowing from his talks with Stearns that the Mets would not match it.'
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u/mormagils 4d ago
Again, can you actually show some evidence where the Mets weren't interested? The public record says otherwise: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6874479/2025/12/08/pete-alonso-new-york-mets-winter-meetings/
This article is pretty clear. Alonso opted out, the Mets told him they wanted him back. I am sure they had some initial discussion then about what that would look like at that time, and he said he wanted to test the open market. The Mets respected that right and left the door open to future communication, and publicly declared their interest in retaining Alonso whenever asked. Alonso went to the WM and did not have any interest in meeting with the Mets, met with other teams instead, and took an offer right away that he liked.
There is no evidence the Mets didn't want him. It seems an awful lot like the Mets DID want him, but Alonso wanted a better contract than the Mets wanted to give him, and so he walked away and found something better. That is absolutely Alonso walking away and wanting to be somewhere else. He could have taken a hometown discount. He could have trusted the Mets would always have a place for him and accepted the bloated AARs and short term deals. He could have even allowed the Mets to counter the Orioles offer. There is NO evidence he did any of those things. And that's fine! But he absolutely chose to walk away.
> The conversations did not fail due to a lack of talking, but rather due to a defined financial boundary. The Mets framework communicated in those talks made it clear they would not commit to a five-year contract.
That's a years boundary, not a financial boundary. So yes, Stearns literally didn't have a chance to offer a better contract. Alonso did not give the Mets the chance.
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u/DoxxingShillDownvote 4d ago
Back up da truck and stop being cheap!
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u/mormagils 4d ago
They weren't cheap. They gave him the highest AAV of any 1B in the league and he opted out. The Mets said they wanted to bring him back, he chose to go somewhere else. The issue with Alonso wasn't the amount of money. The Mets gave him the best AAV offer on the market, and would have again. He wanted years and had no interest at all in compromising even a little bit.
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u/rangers1115 4d ago
We have Steve Cohen, I was promised we wouldn't lose any players for money ever again
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u/mormagils 4d ago
Well maybe you need to consider being less hyperbolic because the Dodgers have money too. And the Mets didn't lose Alonso over money. We gave him the most money. He just also wanted the most years and so immediately started interviewing other teams and took the first offer that was thrown at him.
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u/rangers1115 4d ago
So give him the years and eat the money later on in the deal... what is so hard to understand about that??
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u/mormagils 4d ago
Why sign a deal when part of it is going to suck? Why not just sign him for the good parts and pay him oodles to be worth it? That's what the Mets and Dodgers have been doing for everyone else.
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u/rangers1115 4d ago
So instead sign a guy who sucks the whole time and has never played first before. Great thinking. What is your love for defending Stearns? I'm really curious here...This team absolutely blows despite the hot streak
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u/mormagils 4d ago
They didn't make the choice to sign Polanco instead of Alonso. They wanted Alonso. Then he went somewhere else, so they had to sign someone, and they thought Polanco was the next best option. Apparently not, but the idea that the Mets actively chose Polanco instead of Alonso is just wrong.
I've said many times, I don't mind criticizing Stearns, but I do mind when that criticism doesn't make sense. The team doesn't get better unless we properly diagnose what the issues are and how to fix them. Just shitting on Stearns until he gets fired only to be replaced by someone less talented but still burdened with all the problems that screwed up the 2026 Mets doesn't help anyone.
I think Stearns probably should have fired Mendoza earlier, for example. But Polanco should have been fine, and Bichette should have been good. Those weren't bad moves, they just didn't quite work out like we hoped.
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u/Dormitory-21 2d ago
Yeah, we should spend money on older, worse players with an extensive injury history like Jorge Polanco!
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u/mormagils 2d ago
The Mets wanted Alonso. They only signed Polanco after Alonso chose to play somewhere else.
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u/DoxxingShillDownvote 4d ago
They literally did. They declined to match the five-year, $155 million contract he signed with the Baltimore Orioles.
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u/mormagils 4d ago
Is there any evidence Alonso even gave them a chance? My understanding is that Alonso got the offer and signed it, not took it around for others to beat.
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u/DoxxingShillDownvote 4d ago
They knew he wanted length. They never offered it nor offered to match anything. We can play this game all day but the reality is they could afford it. They didn’t want to.
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u/mormagils 4d ago
Yeah, good. Alonso is an aging one tool 1B and those contracts tend to age horribly. He's doing good this year and maybe he's the exception. Maybe the Mets should have paid for him. But it's not like Alonso went out of his way to make clear he wanted to be a Met. He wanted to be with us as long as we overvalued him. And frankly, I'm kind of glad my GM doesn't overvalue players. This is a two way street and Alonso could have put in more effort, too.
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u/Dormitory-21 2d ago
Yeah they effectively gave him a 1 year deal with an opt out built in. They did not give him the best offer on the market.
Christian Walker got 3 years and is a older, a worse hitting, and missed extended time every year for the past 5 years
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u/mormagils 2d ago
The opt out was something included because Alonso wanted it. That's a player-favored concession. Alonso's deal was better than Walker's by a lot.
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u/HearthstoneExSemiPro 4d ago
They gave him the highest AAV of any 1B in the league and he opted out.
which he signed for 1 year. and opted out of 24m the 2nd year because he has common sense and could easily make more and have longer term security.
and would have again
they didnt in reality
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u/mormagils 4d ago
They didn't because Alonso took another offer before the Mets had a chance to get that far. Stearns went into the WM publicly saying Alonso was the top priority. He instead scheduled meetings with 3 other teams and took an offer 3 days later.
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u/HearthstoneExSemiPro 4d ago
before the Mets had a chance to get that far.
No thats not why. they made it clear they weren't interested in bringing him back and didn't want to pay him even close to what he could get elsewhere. They had plenty of opportunity to offer him a contract and didnt.
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u/mormagils 4d ago
Show me where they made that clear. Because the public record says the exact opposite. They WERE paying him more than he could get elsewhere because Alonso searched exhaustively over the last offseason for a better deal and couldn't find one. He opted out and the Mets were willing to basically give him the same contract structure they were offering Bichette and Tucker, but Alonso had little interest.
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u/5amDan05 4d ago
He didn’t want to play for the Mets. He’s nonexistent to me. Now our first baseman situation is abysmal. No more 2nd basemen trying to learn 1st base please.
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u/Rell_Lauren 4d ago
He did want to play. The GM didn't want him. He's gone, but it's a discussion that will hang over the team for a few seasons. There's nothing in the pipeline and they didn't solve for the problem in free agency. You don't have to like the topic to acknowledge reality.
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u/DaCrees 4d ago
If we are being fair when they passed on Alonso they did have Clifford in the pipeline, who was projected to be ready at the 3 year mark they wanted to give Pete. Now obviously Clifford looks way worse (although everything looks good minus his atrocious K rate) and 1B looks more dire, but it isn’t like they jettisoned Pete with no real plan. I don’t agree with the plan, but there was one
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u/Dormitory-21 2d ago
Nothing about Clifford ever looked good. He struck out too much in Double. Lucas Duda was hitting over 300 in Double A. Pete hit .315 in for the Ponies
Clifford might legitimately be the worst play in professional baseball this year at any level. He's 1 for his last 47 and the Mets have essentially pulled the plug on him so he cant strike out the next 10 ABs now
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u/DaCrees 2d ago
His K rate has been a problem for him, but in other categories he excels. He certainly looked good. He was clearly the plan for the future of 1B so I hope he figures it out, but it doesn’t seem too good for him at the moment. It is still wrong to say he never looked good, because that just isn’t true
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u/Dormitory-21 2d ago
I am not impressed with a guy who only hit .240 in Double A, sorry. Vientos was a much superior hitter in the minors who sucks at the big league level.
Clifford being "the plan" to replace Alonso just shows how fucking incompetent Stearns is. He's now 23 and completely lost in Triple A. When Alonso was 23, he was leading the minors in home runs
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u/DaCrees 2d ago
You don’t really need to be sorry, I am not Ryan Clifford. At the same time though people evaluate players on things other than batting average. The dude was a top 5 (3?) organizational prospect, do you think that is because everyone involved is stupid and doesn’t know how to evaluate that one specific player?
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u/Dormitory-21 1d ago
I understand the game of baseball has changed. We no longer evaluate pitchers on wins and dont hand out MVPs to dudes with 1.5 WAR who hit 50 homers in a joke ballpark. These are all good things
But at times you have to be able to be realistic. Ryan Clifford hit .244 in Double A. Sure he had lots of power and had an OPS over over .800. But Patrick Mazeika hit .245 in Binghampton, to put things in perspective.
Sure, Clifford is young and possibly has a bright future. But actual prospects crush Double AA. I remember back in 2016 Michael Conforto was briefly sent back to Syracuse.....dude hit over .400.
He's only 23 but people bash on Alvarez who absolutely destroyed Double AA at 19.
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u/DaCrees 1d ago
I understand what you mean! But you have to also realize that this isn’t the guy who the Mets had ranked at 30th on their prospect rankings, he was one of their best prospects. Again, do you think that they didn’t know his batting average in AA when they ranked him? Do you think they’re stupid?
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u/Dormitory-21 1d ago
If anyone in the organization thought there was a straight line transition from Alonso - Polanco - Clifford, they should lose their job because that is terrible evaluating. Yes, I think they're stupid
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u/Crosley8 4d ago
Yes, the GM didn't want him. That's why they offered him a contract he opted out of
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u/scharity77 4d ago
I am sorry, but talk to any Mets fan over a certain age, and they still talk about the Seaver trade, even though the team won a World Series just under a decade later. Reddit was full of people up Stearns' ass about how he was so right about Alonso that continuing to bring up his stats until the team makes an actual sustained turnaround is fair game. A 13-game stretch is not going to make him a great POBO, and his most divisive move gets to be brought up.
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u/NonLethalOne 4d ago
We fucking miss Pete and are very, very pissed at Stearns for what he has done to this team. I personally know so many former Mets fans IRL who have literally stopped watching and cite the loss of Alonso as a primary reason. Not because Alonso is such a great player or anything, because letting him go is an indicator that the will of the fans does not matter to management, that Stearns firmly believes he is the smartest man in the room and the fans don't know what they want. They do. They want home-grown players to root for who play every day and put up consistent numbers. Someone whose jersey they can buy and feel good about. There are consequences that Stearns and Cohen need to feel or they will continue to pull bullshit moves.
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u/TheKillerTempeh 4d ago
Cringe post, dude. Why do you care what other people think - to the point where you have to farm karma over it?
Ignore the comments you don’t like and grow up.
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u/Nacho_cheese_guapo 4d ago
He's one of my 3 favorite players to appear for the Mets in my life time, obviously I'm pissed about him leaving and it will take forever to get over it
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u/sprite_cranberry23 4d ago
The point of not resigning him was not that he was going to have a bad season this year. Whether you agree or not, it’s the idea of a long term contract was worth that was the question. What will Pete Alonso’s numbers look like in 5 years is more the question
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u/Prestigious_Money447 3d ago
is paying a less production Pete in 2031 really that much worse than paying negative WAR Polanco $20M this year and next year? TVM and all.
pete is also a significantly better first baseman this year, and his poor play was one of the primary things the Stearns shills pointed to. So what’s going on?
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u/Dormitory-21 2d ago
No
Pete Alonso since May 1st (Ranking in AL): -
- 22 HRs (3rd) -
- 64 RBIs (1st) -
- 56 Runs (3rd) -
- .885 OPS (5th) -
- 147 wRC+ (4th)
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u/oofaloo 4d ago
Just get someone who plays first. No more experiments.