NEW YORK -- “I’m going to tell you a really cool Pete Alonso story,” Jesse Winker said.
Ask Alonso’s friends for an anecdote about him, and you will invariably receive an array of laughs and sideways glances. One Mets teammate leaned back in his seat, a grin forming on his face. He thought for a long while before replying: “I don’t know if I have any that can be written about.”
Hitting coach Jeremy Barnes sifted through a similar set of possibilities, struggling to find the right words.
“He’s just a big goober,” Barnes finally said. “In like, the best way possible. I mean that as a huge compliment.”
For six and a half seasons, Alonso has endeared himself to teammates with his childlike persona, a mix of gumption and innocence bundled into a bourbon cask of a body. He has made five All-Star teams, participated in four Home Run Derbies and won two of them. He possesses one of the sport’s great nicknames and a swing violent enough to support it. Last October, Alonso hit the most impactful Mets home run in years.
He is now three homers away from breaking Darryl Strawberry’s 37-year-old franchise record of 252. Even without that mark, Alonso would be one of the most accomplished position players in team history.
“Just look at his numbers since he’s been called up,” said NL East rival Matt Olson. “He can leave the yard at any point.”
Despite it all, Alonso hasn’t garnered the type of unqualified respect typically reserved for a player of his caliber. Before his Wild Card Series Game 3 homer against the Brewers, pockets of fans littered social media with posts advocating for his departure. The team itself showed scant interest in re-signing him until late in free agency. When the sides finally did reconnect, Alonso wound up agreeing to a contract about one-fourteenth the size of Juan Soto’s. These are hardly the data points of a franchise legend.
But perhaps Alonso’s narrative is better told through the eyes of those who know him well. Winker’s story dates to the early days of 2024 Spring Training, at the start of Grapefruit League games. A former All-Star, Winker had seen his stock fall far enough that he was forced to compete for a spot on the Nationals’ Opening Day roster. The prior season, he had appeared in only 61 games, batting .199.
Winker and Alonso, who knew each other from the youth travel ball circuit in Florida, were chatting casually around the batting cage. Just before they parted ways, Alonso’s tone changed.
“Hey, I want to talk to you,” he said, drawing Winker closer. “I’m really pulling for you. I want you to do your thing this year. Win this job. Let’s go.”
The conversation struck Winker as unusual, considering the two were not teammates.
“So that just shows the kind of human he is,” Winker said. “A lot of dudes could have just been like, ‘What up?’ But for him to say that, it mattered to him and it mattered to me.”
The most striking thing about Alonso coming out of the Draft, longtime friend and teammate Jeff McNeil recalled, was his shoulder-length hair. From there, his reputation mushroomed; within a year or two, Alonso was making enough noise for prospect hounds to trumpet his arrival. When Mets officials decided not to call him up in 2018, fans recoiled. When the team carried him on its Opening Day roster the next year, they exulted.
Since that time, all Alonso has done is slug, setting the Mets’ single-season home run and RBI records along the way. Over the past six and a half seasons, only Aaron Judge has put more balls over Major League fences.
“He’s obviously gotten a lot better over the years,” said former teammate and longtime opponent Zack Wheeler. “It’s cool to see.”
Had the pandemic not limited his production in 2020, Alonso would already be the Mets’ home run king. As things turned out, the return to normalcy spawned a different sort of opportunity.
For years, the Mets have had a veteran serve as master of ceremonies on their bus, grabbing a microphone and entertaining teammates. Due to social distancing, Mets players paused this tradition during the 2020 season. By the time pandemic restrictions were lifted, several older players had left, freeing Alonso to assume the role.
On those rides to and from the airport, he became a quirky emcee -- part Abbott and Costello, part Rick Steves, a dash of Knute Rockne. Alonso retains the mic to this day, serving his audience with jokes and local history lessons.
“He’s actually a history buff, if you didn’t know that,” said longtime teammate Brandon Nimmo. “He knows a lot of fun facts about a lot of cities and can bust it out right off the top of his head.”
In Sacramento, Alonso proudly notified his teammates as they rolled past the terminus of the Pony Express route. In Atlanta, he informed them that the civic emblem is a Phoenix, symbolizing the city’s rebirth after Civil War destruction.
Then there was Chicago.
“I don’t know the name of the bridge, but I call it ‘The Dave Matthews S--- Bridge,’” Alonso said, growing animated. “Do you know the story there?”
The Dave Matthews… what?
“So there’s this bridge in Chicago where, you know how they have the tour boats? Dave Matthews’ bus let all of its septic out while it was stopped on the bridge. It let all the septic through the grates that lifted up. There was a boat going underneath the bridge, and then it was just gallons and gallons of septic on these tourists. So that’s a thing. There’s actually a plaque to memorialize it there.”
Wait, really? The Dave Matthews Band dumped human waste on a bunch of tourists?
“Look it up,” Alonso said.
Earlier this season, when UK-born Braves pitcher Michael Petersen threw an inning against the Mets, Alonso assumed a British accent in the dugout and began loudly making Boston Tea Party references. He’ll shift in and out of characters, including a “country farmer” persona he’s recently favored. (During a 25-minute interview last month, Alonso lapsed into that southern drawl multiple times.)
Before a different game in Atlanta, a television camera caught Alonso in full conversation with the Braves’ mascot Blooper, who like most mascots is mute. During All-Star media day, a reporter asked him which MLB rule he’d most like to change. Alonso replied that a batter should be able to charge the mound and fight a pitcher at any time, so long as the pitcher also wants to fight.
“He’s nuts,” Nimmo said, shaking his head. “When you get to see the real Pete, you just know he is goofy in the best way possible. It’s so disarming when you’re with him, and it’s genuine. He’s not trying or anything. It’s just the way that he is.”
Shortly after Alonso arrived in the Majors, veteran teammate Todd Frazier was sitting nearby when the rookie stood up and stretched as if coming out of hibernation. Frazier, who never lacked for things to say, told Alonso he looked like a polar bear.
Frazier began repeating the nickname frequently to teammates and reporters. Then everyone began saying it.
“And it goes with your name,” Frazier told him. “Polar Bear Pete. Pete the Polar Bear. It kind of just stuck.”
As he approaches Strawberry’s record, Polar Bear Pete is concurrently nearing another career inflection point. From the day he reported to Spring Training in February, Alonso began referencing his newly signed two-year, $54 million deal as “kind of like a bridge thing just to get to the next contract.” He all but said he planned to break Strawberry’s record, then opt out. But once Alonso reaches that mark, his ties to the organization will only deepen. Would he really become the franchise’s home run king and immediately leave?
Ask Alonso, and he’ll insist he doesn’t dwell upon these things as often as others do. Late last year, while fans around Queens spent several tense months wondering if he might return, Alonso’s mind was mostly on his home in Tampa, which took on three feet of water during Hurricane Helene. He and his wife, Haley, spent the winter in temporary housing. They lost furniture and memorabilia. When they move back after this season, it will be a literal homecoming after nearly two years.
By that point, Alonso will be a first-time father, which he expects to bend his perspective even more. Now 30 years old, Alonso is already thinking about life beyond baseball. He wants to play through his age-40 season, “and then at 41, I’ll be done.”
In the year 2035, Alonso said, his son will be 10, at a point when “sports start to get pretty organized, schedules get busy.” He wants to be there for Haley, who “has sacrificed so much.”
If playing into his 40s may seem overly optimistic, that jibes with Alonso’s nature. One of the early criticisms of Alonso crystallized after an August 2021 sweep in Philadelphia, which knocked the Mets out of first place. Asked to deliver a message to his supporters, Alonso began soliloquizing, telling folks to “believe” and to “know” that everything would be all right. The clip went viral, prompting fans to react with typical New York cynicism. One social media poster opined that “Pete probably still believes in Santa Claus.” Another implored him to “read the room.”
Those close to Alonso understood that while his words may have seemed Pollyannish, they were genuine.
“He’s goofy enough to where people love him, and he’s serious enough to where people respect the way he plays the game,” Frazier said. “And I think this year, especially what he went through in the offseason trying to figure out where he’s going … then how he’s performing right now? The dude is locked in.”
Despite some fits and starts, Alonso could still launch back into free agency off the finest season of his career. At the All-Star break, he was on pace for new highs in batting average, on-base percentage, walk rate and league-adjusted OPS+. While those numbers have since dimmed, Alonso has an outside chance to reach 40 homers for the fourth time in his career. He should easily eclipse 30, a mark he’s hit in every full season so far. If he sticks around long-term, he could put the Mets’ home run record well out of reach.
“What I want to be remembered as is a player of substance,” Alonso said. “I just want to be remembered as a guy who plays the game hard, the guy who’s, like, the ultimate competitor. … I want to be known as a guy that performs and plays the game and wins. That’s really it.”
Six years after his dynamic rookie season, Alonso is still trying to carry his teammates to that utopia in his mind. It hasn’t always been smooth. It won’t always be easy. Yet even if the Mets must float through a river full of discharged septic to get there, Alonso has proven he will happily steer the boat.