Mets hoping for a late-season Polar Bear surge

There are plenty of reasons why the Mets came into Saturday’s games still 7 1/2 games behind the Phillies, and still on the outside of the Wild Card race in the National League looking in -- even in this season when the Mets keep getting back up after getting knocked down.

They’ve had their ace, Kodai Senga, for exactly 5 1/3 innings. They lost their closer, Edwin Díaz, to a sticky-stuff, 10-game suspension at a moment when they had just won 10 of 12, then watched their bullpen struggle mightily while Díaz was gone. Francisco Alvarez, their kid catcher, was gone for two months on the injured list. Starling Marte has only played 70 games so far. Other teams have had their own share of bad luck, for sure. It doesn’t mean the Mets haven’t had theirs.

But sometimes, it seems that the player the Mets are missing the most is the one who has played every game this season, and that is Pete Alonso.

It's not that Alonso is having a terrible season. He’s not -- even with substandard numbers, at least by his own high standards, across the board: 27 homers, 70 RBIs, a .468 slugging percentage and an OPS of .801 (the last two numbers are career lows). But Mets fans keep waiting for Alonso to bust out the way his manager, Carlos Mendoza, knows he can. He isn’t having the bear of a season to which they’ve become accustomed -- that means a Polar Bear. The fans also know that if he turns back into that guy in September, it could make all the difference for the Mets.

“When he gets hot,” Mendoza told me not long ago, “he’s going to carry us for a month.”

Mendoza and Alonso’s teammates would very much like it to be the month of September.

Alonso came up to the Mets in 2019. All he did that season was break the rookie home run record that Aaron Judge had set just two years before. Then starting in ’19 and through last season, Alonso had hit more home runs than Judge had. Of course he’d done that missing a lot fewer games than Judge -- 24 to Judge’s 147 across those five years -- but durability matters, too, in baseball. Buck Showalter, Alonso’s old manager, has always referred to it as “posting up.”

But unless Alonso does get hot in September, it is hard to see him getting to 40 or more home runs, something he has already done three times (he also hit 37 in 2021). In what could be his last season with the Mets since he’s on the verge of free agency, he has not yet been the force he has been since showing up in the big leagues and immediately began hitting balls out of sight. The only homegrown slugger to whom you could compare Alonso in Mets history was Darryl Strawberry, and the most home runs in a season Strawberry hit for the Mets was 39, something he did twice.

So the kid from Plant City, Fla., became Home Run Derby Pete, in all ways. And he's still hitting them. Just not the way he has in the past. Coming into Saturday’s games, there were still only 11 players with more home runs than he’s hit this season, such as Judge, who seems to hit another home run every day and seems well on his way to getting to 60 homers and beyond this season. Giancarlo Stanton has hit 22 homers for the Yankees this season, five fewer than Alonso but in 42 fewer games. Mark Vientos, the Mets’ young third baseman, has hit 20 homers in 81 games for his team. That’s 48 fewer games than Alonso, who has played all 129.

Alonso has, in his time in the big leagues, become one of the most popular and admirable iron men in the game. If you talk to him at least once -- and I’ve talked to him a lot more than that -- it is impossible not to root for him, and not root just as hard for him to make all the money he can in free agency with the Mets or somebody else.

A couple of weeks ago, Alonso hit a couple of home runs against the Rockies and the young guy who doesn’t turn 30 until December did look like the Polar Bear of old. He looked like he might be doing the coming-out-of-hibernation thing that he keeps expecting, his manager keeps expecting, his teammates keep expecting and Mets fans keep expecting.

“Honestly, I just want to keep having good at-bats and doing the best that I can, just stick to my plan and my approach,” Alonso said at the time. “Homers can be happy accidents, just the result of swinging and capitalizing on a good pitch and hitting it hard to the big part of the field.”

He remains one of the good guys. I frankly think he isn’t going anywhere after the season, even if the Mets go hard after Juan Soto and try to put Soto ahead of Alonso in a batting order the way he’s ahead of Judge in the Bronx. But those happy accidents Alonso talked about after that Rockies game? The Mets are hoping for a month of them.