Pete Alonso Has Mets Fans Down Bad

The operative fact is that the Mets were eliminated from the playoffs on Monday. Everything about Pete Alonso’s return to Queens this week as an Oriole is inseparable from that, in time but also in causation, to a subset of Mets fans. They gave him four separate standing ovations on Monday not only because he was a well-liked former player—and go ask a WFAN call screener from 2024 to see how ahistorical it would be to say he was universally beloved at the time—but because of what his absence from New York represents: a team with a $340 million payroll, again, that missed the playoffs, again.

By the end of Tuesday night, it was clearer that the Alonso lovefest wasn’t entirely about Alonso. The big man homered off closer Kodai Senga in the ninth to tie the game, the 300th of his career, and he reacted by throwing his bat back toward the visitors’ dugout like a Thracian peltast. And then, once Alonso had circled the bases, the real fun began.