In the wake of his second straight Home Run Derby victory last July, Pete Alonso stated his belief that he’s “the best power hitter on the planet.”
Alonso will have a chance to back up that claim again Monday night, when he looks to become the first hitter to win three consecutive derbies. (The only other hitter to win three total is Ken Griffey Jr.)
But for the Mets this season, Alonso has been something different — something even more valuable than the Earth’s best power hitter.
“It’s the anchor,” teammate J.D. Davis said of Alonso. “He’s becoming the complete hitter we all knew he could be.”
“He does all the heavy lifting for our team,” said hitting coach Eric Chavez.
Alonso’s fourth season in the major leagues has been his best. His 78 RBIs are a franchise record before the break; a grouch may point out the extra games New York has played in this first half, to which it can be rebutted that Alonso is on a per-game pace to surpass the franchise’s full-season RBI mark by more than 10. He’s also on pace to hit more home runs in a season than any Met not named Pete Alonso.
There’s the record. Pete Alonso drives in his 75th run prior to the all-star break. The previous franchise record was David Wright’s 74 RBI in the first half of 2006. pic.twitter.com/MeMXnY4B7D
— Steve Gelbs (@SteveGelbs) July 16, 2022
In many ways, he’s pieced together the best offensive elements of his three prior years, showcasing the prodigious power of his record-breaking rookie season alongside the increasingly mature plate approach he displayed much of last season.
“Winning the home run contest and all that stuff, people think he’s a power hitter,” said Chavez. “But he’s really putting himself on the map as being a really good hitter.”
That’s been most evident this season in Alonso’s performance with runners in scoring position. It’s not as if he’d struggled in that department in the past, posting an OPS in those spots in line with his production otherwise. This season, though, Alonso has been at his best in the most important points of a game. He’s batting .281 with a 1.058 OPS with runners in scoring position, and he’s driven in 19.2 percent of available base runners this season — putting him within striking range of challenging another franchise record.
All season, Alonso has attributed that success to knowing himself better as a hitter. Studious enough to take handwritten nightly notes about his at-bats in a composition book, Alonso has worked diligently on applying those lessons to craft a more refined approach. To him, the foundation of hitting is proper swing decisions.
“It just gives reassurance to my plan,” he said. “Knowing myself and knowing my zone, that’s super key to executing the plan when in the box.”
“When I watch Pete,” Chavez said, “his takes tell me everything about the at-bat.”
How does one learn himself?
“Learn from failures. That’s pretty much it,” Alonso said. “There’s something to learn from every single at-bat. I just want to be able to apply different little lessons from every at-bat. I just want to gain as much information as possible.”
“It’s understanding who he is,” assistant hitting coach Jeremy Barnes said. “It’s Pete Alonso. They’re going to pitch him differently than other people in our lineup. It’s knowing himself, knowing what that pitcher is going to try to do. And it’s not being in a hurry to hit. The pitcher at the end of the day has to throw the ball over the plate to him. If they throw sliders and curveballs and changeups and they’re not in the zone, a walk’s as good as a hit in a lot of situations.”
Chavez wanted Alonso to work on his on-base percentage this year — not to explicitly seek out walks, but to accept them when given.
Alonso’s best stretch of this season, from early May through the last week of June, coincided with some of the best plate discipline of his career. While posting a four-digit OPS, he walked more than 10 percent of the time and struck out less than 20 percent of the time. Most hitters who have recently done that over a full season have won an MVP.
One of the guys who’s done that is someone Alonso’s hitting coach knows well — a player Chavez sees shades of in Alonso.
“He’s slowly becoming a right-handed version of Jason Giambi,” Chavez said. “There’s just aspects of what he’s doing now, it’s in his DNA. Jason did it for a really long time. That’s the difference. Guys do it for a long time and it’s year after year after year. Pete is just morphing into that elite hitter right before our eyes.”
Alonso’s approach and day-to-day consistency has been challenged in the month of July, when he’s slumped for the first time all year. His chase rate has gone up a bit in the process. That said, the Mets are confident that part of Alonso’s evolving self-awareness is his ability to shorten such downturns.
“When he was struggling a little bit, sometimes he wouldn’t take his hits,” said Davis. “What he’s learned since 2019 is when he’s going through those ruts to take his walks and take those base hits. And then when you’re feeling good, all right big boy, start hitting those home runs.”
“It seems like every day he’s impacting the game,” Francisco Lindor said. “He’s scoring, he’s driving in runs, he’s hitting for power and taking base hits. Even the outs are loud. Every time the game is on the line, you know he’s coming through.”
“In a game of inconsistencies, to be consistent is really damn hard,” Alonso said. “I just want to be the best I can.”
(Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / USA Today)
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism