⚾ Baseball Bytes: Pete Alonso and the Mets Belong Together
After an offseason seemingly spent headed for divorce, Alonso is giving the Mets every reason to recommit. Plus, mapping the best ex-player MLB broadcasters, and why MVP Baseball still holds up.
Welcome to Baseball Bytes1 — a column in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various baseball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Baseball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
⚾ Polar Bear, Packed and Unpacked
When Pete Alonso burst onto the scene for the New York Mets in 2019 with 53 home runs — breaking crosstown rival Aaron Judge’s rookie record of 52 from a few years earlier — he seemed like the larger-than-life slugger the franchise (and its fans) had been looking for since the days of Carlos Delgado, Mike Piazza or maybe even Darryl Strawberry.
Which, of course, made it all the more surprising that both Alonso and the Mets went into 2025 having spent several years seemingly intent on a split sooner rather than later. In June 2023, Alonso reportedly rejected a 7-year, $158M extension in which the two sides “never got close to a deal”. This led the Mets to potentially ponder trading Alonso when the team started 2024 horribly, something that may have actually happened if the team hadn’t engaged in its Grimace-fueled midseason turnaround.
Then came the 2024-25 offseason, when Alonso (with agent Scott Boras) turned down the qualifying offer and the two sides repeatedly failed to iron out a series of 3-year deals. Alonso was reportedly close to leaving the Mets, though he didn’t like the market elsewhere and eventually returned in February… but only on a 2-year “bridge” deal with a 2025 opt-out, allowing him to bet on himself and test the waters again after this season.
In other words, all signs still pointed to a looming split between the team and arguably its most popular player.
But a funny thing has happened at the beginning of the 2025 season: Not only are the Mets off to a great start, entering Tuesday’s play leading the NL East with a 16-7 record, but Alonso is playing his best baseball in a long time — if not ever. He currently leads the National League with 24 RBIs, a .695 slugging percentage and an 1.140 OPS. His pace of 11.1 Wins Above Replacement2 per 162 team games ranks fourth in MLB behind Fernando Tatis Jr., Aaron Judge and Corbin Carroll.
Obviously, that WAR mark will come back down to earth, probably by a lot, before season’s end. But even a regressed version of Alonso’s early pace — FanGraphs thinks he’ll put up around 3 more WAR the rest of the way — would reverse what had been a worrying trend at the very core of the tension between the Mets and Alonso’s camp.
The truth was, after 5.1 WAR per 162 in that explosive rookie season of 2019, Alonso hadn’t returned to that level since, and he had dipped from 4.1 (a borderline All-Star figure) to 3.0 and then to 2.3 (kind of an average starter level) over the preceding three seasons.
If it meant choosing between Alonso walking without compensation and overpaying him on a huge deal, it was looking like the Mets might have been better off trading their slugger at the deadline last year. (In which case the team’s magical surge was secretly a negative development in disguise.) As it was, New York president of baseball operations David Stearns did his best to avoid a risky long-term commitment to a 30-year-old first baseman who might not have the most favorable aging profile.
However, Alonso is currently doing so well — and so is the team, with Francisco Lindor, Juan Soto and the rest — that Stearns and owner Steve Cohen may end up with no choice but to reconsider their offseason stance. Surely Alonso is on track to opt out after the season, and quite possibly to beat all those offers he turned down when everything is said and done.
If this season proves anything, though, it’s that Alonso and the Mets might just be better off together. Alonso is a homegrown Mets star and fan favorite, while New York needs his power bat, even in a lineup that also contains Soto. In other words, the best long-term move all along might have been the one that keeps the Polar Bear in Queens for good.
For now, though, we can already say that Alonso’s short-term gamble is working to perfection — for both himself and, perhaps unexpectedly, the Mets as well.
⚾ Talkin' (And Before That, Playin’) Baseball
I love watching MLB Network in the mornings, and my favorite show — with no offense intended to Brian Kenny and MLB Now, a program I’ve been on before — is probably MLB Central, with its great combination of in-depth breakdowns, interviews and perfect chemistry between hosts Lauren Shehadi, Mark DeRosa and Robert Flores.
Seeing the analysis from “DeRo” — who’ll return as Team USA’s manager for the 2026 World Baseball Classic — always makes me think back to his playing career, first as a utilityman for my hometown Braves, and later as a pretty damn good player for the Rangers and Cubs. DeRosa certainly made the most of his talent, but he is also one of many ex-players on the MLB Network roster of personalities, many of whom were even greater talents than the man who had 21 HRs and an .857 OPS while playing nearly every position for the 2008 Cubs.
This, in turn, motivated me to map out the entire universe (as best as I could gather it) of former players currently on national baseball TV broadcasts, whether in studio or calling games. I combed through Wikipedia and network bio pages for all of the major networks who carry MLB games, tracking for each ex-player their JAWS components — career WAR and peak WAR (the total in their best seven seasons). Here’s how they all stack up against each other:
As it turns out, DeRosa’s career was fairly common of players-turned-TV-personalities. He occupies a sector of players that had fewer than 20 WAR in either their peak or career buckets, a group that makes up about half of all the names on our list — and it includes some really fun company like Xavier Scruggs, Dan Plesac, Kevin Millar, Jeff Francoeur, Harold Reynolds and Sean “The Mayor” Casey.
But beyond DeRo’s group, there is still more rarified territory when it comes to players turned broadcasters. Soon, we enter the realm of some really good players — Cliff Floyd, Orlando Hernandez, Ryan Dempster, D-Train Dontrelle Willis, Carlos Peña and Mike Lowell — and then into some outright stars — Rick Sutcliffe, Al Leiter, Jake Peavy, Jimmy Rollins, Curtis Granderson, Adam Wainwright and (weirdly) David Ortiz.
(WAR has some trouble with designated hitters because of its harsh defensive position adjustment.)
Cy Young pitcher David Cone serves as a bridge to the truly immortal class of players in the announcer ranks: Jim Thome, Derek Jeter, John Smoltz, Frank Thomas, Pedro Martinez, Albert Pujols and A-Rod. In baseball, we seem to have more legends forge post-playing careers on TV than in football, where I once found that the sweet spot for ex-QBs was actually not among the very best, but rather a level below in that Tony Romo/Jay Cutler tier.3
Generally, it seems that MLB Network and ESPN tend to go more for the rank-and-file type of players in their coverage (with Pujols and Thome being huge exceptions), while TBS and FOX go for more superstar names — perhaps indicative of the different goals each network has in terms of daily coverage for the former group versus a playoff event focus for the latter.
Of course, no matter how many WAR they put up in MLB, a player’s career on the field is sometimes only the beginning of their story. Just think back to DeRosa — while he never made an All-Star team, any morning viewer of MLB Central can tell you that he has become a star in his retirement from playing baseball.
⚾ The Eternal Joy of MVP Baseball 2005 2025
Finally, I have to put in a plug for a silly mod to a very old game that has brought me back to the joy of baseball video gaming.
After playing it for several years via cloud gaming by way of XBox Game Pass, I was bummed to learn that MLB The Show 25 would not be available on the service — meaning my non-OOTP options for baseball gaming on the computer were down to Super Mega Baseball 4 (a very fun arcade game) or a few microtransaction-laden new options on Steam that I’m not thrilled about.
However, I knew that there is a thriving mod community on PC for MVP Baseball 2005, the immortal GOAT of baseball games that was killed by EA Sports’ own craven decision to pay for NFL exclusivity instead of competing with 2K, a move that still has far-ranging effects in the sports gaming world to this day. So I wagered there would also be at least some kind of mod for my preferred mode of “console” gaming these days: emulating the PlayStation 2 using PCSX2.
Sure enough, I found a message board entry at Operation Sports from March, in which user “TreyzAllDayz” uploaded his 2025 MVP rosters in .psv file format. (Apparently Treyz originally bought a 2016 roster card off of Amazon and has been updating it every year for nearly a decade since.) I was close to procuring modern, updated rosters for this 20-year-old PS2 game.
Now, what the hell is a .psv file, and what do I do with it? I was not the first person to ask this question, and luckily there is an online app that converts a .psv to the .psu format required in virtual memory cards for PCSX2. After using that, I simply needed to download a program called mymc, which allows you to edit save components into and out of a memory card’s data. After some finagling, I fired up MVP Baseball 2005,4 loaded the new save file, and suddenly “Tessie” was being accompanied by Alex Bregman on the Red Sox and Kyle Tucker on the Cubs.
As for the game itself? Readers certainly know that I do have a tendency to wax nostalgic about the era of the 1990s and 2000s, something I will readily admit. But I am also a longtime MLB The Show player, and would have gladly continued being that if it had not been pulled from Game Pass. So I say that, even in the context of newer games, MVP ‘05 holds up surprisingly well — between its color-coded pitch-tipping mechanic, satisfying metered pitching, 120-season (!) franchise/owner modes, and countless other features.5
The updated rosters are sometimes a bit rough. I am playing a Baltimore Orioles franchise, and created-player name lengths are capped for some reason, so “Ryan Montcastle” and “Adley Ruschman” are cornerstones of the team. Many of the players need their face models adjusted. And I haven’t even gotten into the ratings deeply enough to know where they need work. But still! It’s a joyous feeling to boot up what is effectively MVP Baseball 2025, and be instantly transported back to a simpler time when sports games were purely about fun instead of hyper-monetization tactics.
Filed under: Baseball, Baseball Bytes
Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.
According to JEFFBAGWELL — the Joint Estimate Featuring FanGraphs and B-R Aggregated to Generate WAR, Equally Leveling Lists — which combines the two leading WAR estimates into a single number.
Tom Brady’s frequently-panned performance this past season seems to reinforce my point.
I’ll leave it to you and Google to figure out where to get that.
Back when they jammed as many features as possible in these PS2-era sports games.