Best of BP 2025: Another Sunset in Flushing

Baltimore Orioles signed free agent 1B Pete Alonso to a five-year, $155 million contract.

The hammer of the gods
Will drive our ships to new lands
To fight the horde and sing and cry
Valhalla, I am coming

We’ll get to the Mets in a moment, but first let’s not forget that this is a watershed moment for the Orioles. Under Mike Elias, Baltimore has been criticized basically nonstop (though fairly) for market passivity, unwilling to spend at the top of the market, unable to step out of the comfort zone of good value. No longer.

Andrew Friedman, the greatest baseball executive of this century, once astutely observed that “if you’re always rational about every free agent, you will finish third on every free agent.” The Orioles have done that time and time again this decade, as recently as with Kyle Schwarber earlier this week. They have completely crossed the bounds of rationality with this contract—we’ll cover that in a moment too—adding a 31-year-old first baseman who should probably be a DH, which certainly does not alleviate their already existing pile-up of buried young corner talent. (Note to opportunistic presidents of baseball operations: time to call on Coby Mayo.)

But, irrational contract and blocked prospects aside, they now have a genuine big star in Alonso, the first they’ve acquired in free agency during Elias’s tenure. Since entering the majors in 2019, Alonso has more RBI than anyone in the sport and more homers than all but Schwarber and Aaron Judge. He is a five-time All-Star, a two-time Home Run Derby champion, and a former Rookie of the Year. That will sell tickets at Camden Yards. It will give hope to kids and grandparents in Baltimore coming off a crappy season. That has genuine value; not on-field value, of course, but things do matter to a franchise other than the WARs and the DRAs.

On the field, Alonso will certainly help in the short-term. He’s coming off the best DRC+ of his career (145) and his quality of contact improved nearly across the board, led by a nearly four-tick gain in average exit velocity. This came with a very noticeable change in his swing attack profile, shortening his length and letting the ball get deeper into the zone while swinging a little steeper. And like all swing changes, there was a profile cost too—albeit one that is for now more than worth it—in that he pulled the ball a little less and missed in the zone a little more.

For the out years…well, do you want to know the terrifying truth or do you want to see the guy with Immigrant Song going through his head sock some dingers?

***

So now you’d better stop
And rebuild all your ruins
For peace and trust can win the day
Despite of all your losing

Since 2019, the constants of the New York Mets have been Brandon Nimmo, Edwin Díaz, and Pete Alonso. They outlasted three managers, five heads of baseball operations, dozens of coaches and executives, and even an ownership group. And now all three are gone, excised from the roster in just three short weeks in a shockingly efficient gutting of the core. Amongst veteran long-term Mets inherited by David Stearns, only Francisco Lindor and Jeff McNeil remain—and McNeil very well might be out the door next.

These players were more or less universally beloved amongst the Mets fanbase: online and offline, on Twitter and Bluesky, in talk radio and tabloid papers, at the water cooler and in the lunch room. Yet, it was also demonstrably a core which was not working; the Mets missed the playoffs in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023, and 2025 (and I cannot imagine anyone considering their 2022 NL East implosion and quick playoff exit a rousing success). The 2024 Mets were quite a lot of fun—and Alonso himself hit one of the biggest home runs in franchise history during that run—but ultimately this was the aging core of a team that never peaked.

Look, it is my personal aesthetic preference as a baseball fan for guys like Alonso to play their entire careers with one team and become franchise immortals. Barring a Freddie Freeman-style gentle decline, Alonso is not going to be enshrined in Cooperstown. But if he had stayed a Met, he would’ve had his number retired alongside Wright and Piazza. He would’ve had a statue outside of the stadium next to Seaver’s. He’d have been remembered as the greatest hitter in franchise history. To quote the preeminent poet of my generation, that’s a real f*cking legacy.

But Pete Alonso is the one who gets to decide how important that is to him. Yes, perhaps I want that statue outside Citi Field so my wife and I can reminisce about the home run he hit on our first date 20 or 30 years from now. You probably have your own story, your own sentimental attachment to him. Yet I cannot truthfully tell you that Alonso should care about his legacy as a Met more than he should care about the money or the years or the clubhouse chemistry or his relationship with ownership or what preschool options he will have for his son or even the weather. Alonso has earned the right to decide what matters to him. I have not.

I am also not particularly convinced Stearns should care about Pete Alonso’s legacy. Is the goal to hang pennants or retired numbers? Almost all of us root for the laundry, after all. Was any Phillies fan really happy watching Ryan Howard play out the string under the Mendoza line for terrible teams? Was the Miguel Cabrera chase for 3000 hits and 500 home runs worth seven losing seasons of meager offensive production? These are emotional questions for certain, but perhaps not actually tough ones.

The Mets front office made a cold decision here: Alonso, a 31-year-old right-handed first baseman with already declining athletic markers and terrible defense, is likely to age poorly. They’re right, of course; nearly every long-term contract for an over-30-year-old first baseman goes south sooner or later. If he loses even a grade of bat speed or bat-to-ball ability, his hitting outputs will plummet, and Alonso is right at the post-peak age where those particular skills often start to go. Since he provides no meaningful secondary value, there’s a concerningly high chance Alonso’s going to be an extremely well compensated but not particularly good DH by the middle of this contract, let alone the end. And realistically, once the ink is dry, he’s playing for all five of those years if healthy. The Mets couldn’t easily bench the legend who holds every franchise offensive record or a star making $31 million a year, let alone the slugger who is both.

I wrote my first article for Baseball Prospectus almost 14 years ago to the day. It was a piece titled “Sunset in Flushing,” co-authored with my good friend Jonathan Bernhardt, the spiritual inspiration for the Led Zeppelin motifs in this piece. It was a deep dive about the Mets blowing up the core of a team that was not working, spurred on by a popular free agent walking at the Winter Meetings coming off his best offensive year. Nothing ever changes. So I will leave you with our conclusion then; the names may have changed to McLean and Benge and Tong, but the song remains the same:

“[A]ll that’s left for Mets fans is the sighing, the cursing, the bitter unfairness, and the waiting. But soon it will be spring, and they’ll find themselves checking reports from spring training; hearing names like Wheeler and Harvey and Familia maybe for the first time. A year will pass, then two, and those names will become familiar to their lips. They will worry about these names and their arms, perhaps more than is healthy. In time, they will begin to hope. They will check the minor-league box scores and try not to think of 1996.

Then they will wait, and wait some more. And one day the sun will rise again.”