Fever Baseball — Special Edition · 2026-09-25
The Formulas
In February 2025, Pete Alonso told the Mets what he thought of their formulas. Two seasons later, one of the two questions in that room has an answer.
By Andy Whetstone
In February 2025, in a Tampa social club, Pete Alonso told the Mets' head of baseball operations what he thought of the club's formulas. The line stayed private for fifteen months. It is now on a T-shirt, and the two seasons since that meeting have answered one of the two questions in the room.
The Seam — feverbaseball.com reads players, not prices
Stats current through September 25, 2026, Baltimore's most recent game. Feverbaseball figures through September 25, pulled September 26; they are the site's own calculations from MLB tracking data, not official league statistics.
Yankee Stadium, Friday, September 25, the first game of a doubleheader. In the third inning Pete Alonso hit a first-pitch slider from Brendan Beck, a Yankees rookie, 407 feet. In the seventh he got a changeup and hit it 471 feet, at 113 miles an hour, halfway up the left-field bleachers. Baltimore led 9-1. It won 10-2.
The 471-footer was the fourth-longest home run in the majors this year, the Associated Press reported. It was his 43rd of the season, the most in the American League. The 407-footer in the third had been his seventh straight hit to leave the park. No Oriole had done that since Mark Trumbo in 2016.
Before one of the two games that day, the New York Post reported, he wore a BreakingT shirt made for his 300th career home run. The shirt reprints a line from a meeting with David Stearns nineteen months earlier. As the Post printed it on September 26:
"When my career is being evaluated for the Hall of Fame years from now, you'll still be fiddling with your f–king formulas."
The room was the Stovall House, a social club in Tampa, the city where Alonso was born. The meeting started at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, February 4, 2025. He was still a free agent.
Steve Cohen, the Mets' owner, stopped in on his way to the owners' meetings. Stearns was there too. Alonso brought his agents, Scott Boras and Mike Fiore. Cohen talked about the meeting later that month, in remarks Sports Illustrated carried. "I just felt that the negotiation had gone on so long, I just wanted to make sure that he heard from us how we felt about him," he said. He also said: "Pete did all the talking ... Scott Boras was there and Scott didn't say a freaking word the whole time!"
What Pete said about the formulas stayed in the room until Thursday, May 7, 2026, when Jon Heyman reported it in the Post. In Bleacher Report's account of that column, Alonso also told Stearns he was using analytics and biomechanics to get back to his best. Stearns and Cohen responded, according to Heavy's account of that column, by suggesting they'd try to work out a deal.
They did. Within a day the two sides had agreed: two years, $54 million, with a $10 million signing bonus, $20 million for 2025, and $24 million for 2026 that Alonso could decline.
He was coming off a .240 season with 34 home runs. Each side kept a door. Alonso got a season to prove the bat. The Mets got to skip the long years.
He used the season. In 2025 he hit 38 home runs, with 41 doubles, and drove in 126. On Tuesday, August 12, in the third inning against Atlanta, he hit a Spencer Strider fastball for his 253rd home run as a Met, one more than Darryl Strawberry. In November he won his first Silver Slugger.
The Mets went 83-79 and missed the playoffs. On September 29, SNY quoted Stearns on what went wrong. "From a roster construction perspective, on the run-prevention side of the ball, we didn't do a good enough job of fortifying our team when we had injuries midseason," he said.
On November 3, 2025, Alonso declined the $24 million and became a free agent again. CBS Sports wrote that the Mets never made him an offer, "as it became clear to them that Alonso was getting bids for more dollars and years than in their comfort zone."
On Wednesday, December 10, at the Winter Meetings, he agreed with Baltimore: five years, $155 million, no opt-outs, no deferrals. That comes to $31 million a year. CBS called it the second-highest annual value ever given to a first baseman, tied with Miguel Cabrera and behind Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
Three days later the Mets agreed to two years and $40 million with Jorge Polanco, an infielder who'd hit 26 home runs for Seattle in 2025. MLB Trade Rumors reported he was expected to replace Alonso at first base, though he'd never played an inning there in the majors.
A contract is a bet on years, not on a season. On Baltimore's deal the later years pay more than the first one, and the player is older by then. Alonso's contract runs through 2030, the year he turns 36.
In the reporting reviewed for this piece, Stearns has not explained publicly why the Mets never made an offer. When Alonso agreed with Baltimore, MLB Trade Rumors wrote that the Mets had been "reportedly reluctant to go beyond three years in their talks with Alonso." Baltimore bought five.
Alonso's question was about now. He had told them he'd be back to his best.
The two seasons since have answered his question. They can't answer the Mets' question yet, because the long years haven't happened.
The three seasons, from Baseball-Reference:
| Season | Club | Line | HR | RBI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Mets | .240/.329/.459 | 34 | 88 |
| 2025 | Mets | .272/.347/.524 | 38 | 126 |
| 2026 | Orioles | .267/.363/.522 | 43 | 113 |
The 2026 line runs through September 25, over 161 games and 700 plate appearances. His 113 RBI are the most by an Oriole since Chris Davis drove in 117 in 2015.
Polanco's 2026, from the same source: 37 games and a .148 average. He played first base twice and designated hitter 34 times. Ankle surgery in August ended his season, the Sporting News reported. First base went mostly to Jared Young and Mark Vientos.
Feverbaseball runs a formula too, and it has a reading on Alonso.
The site tracks EV95, the 95th percentile of a hitter's exit velocities: "the top of his range, not the middle," in the site's words. Through September 25, Alonso's is 109.5 miles an hour this season, harder than 92 percent of the 403 qualified major-league hitters it follows. Measured against that same field, the site says, "his results on contact run further below the physics than 95% of them." Then it sums up the American League's home run leader in five words: "Loud bat, quieter stat line."
The gap between what a hitter's contact earned and what it got "tends to close," the site's legend says. "It does not owe him anything."
Baltimore beat the Mets 2-1 at Citi Field on Monday, September 14, and the loss eliminated New York from the playoffs.
On Tuesday, September 15, in the top of the ninth, Alonso hit a Kodai Senga pitch 414 feet to tie the game 3-3. It was his 300th career home run, and his 36th of the season. According to the AP, "Fans chanted his name until Alonso emerged from the dugout for a curtain call." Then came chants of "Fire Stearns." Baltimore won 7-5 in 11 innings.
"There's a lot of history here with me," Alonso told ESPN afterward. "I appreciate all the support for all the years I've been here."
Through September 25, the Mets are 73-87 and the Orioles are 79-82. Neither club is going to the playoffs. On Thursday, September 24, Juan Soto told the Post's Mike Puma, in remarks SNY carried the next day, that the Mets should "go and get as much as we can." He also said, "There is nothing I can do other than blame myself. I have got to be better."
Baltimore plays its last game Sunday, September 27, in the Bronx.
The Hall of Fame sentence is about a vote years from now. Nobody can grade it from here. It was what a 30-year-old said in a Tampa club, while the two sides were still apart.
The other thing he told them that afternoon, that he'd be back to his best, can be graded, and it has been, twice. The second grade went into the left-field bleachers at Yankee Stadium, 471 feet from home plate, in a Baltimore uniform.
The formulas stayed in Queens. Their question went to Baltimore with him.