Skidding Mets Lose Pete Alonso When They Could Really Use a Hand

It was a bad week for the Mets, to say the least. In the midst of a seven-game losing streak that began with a sweep at home by the Blue Jays and continued with a trio of excruciating losses to the Braves in Atlanta, they lost Pete Alonso, likely for at least the remainder of the month, after he was hit on the left wrist. First and foremost, the injury knocked the Mets’ most productive hitter out of the lineup. It also ended whatever hopes Alonso — the major league leader in home runs with 22 — had to reach 60 for the season.

In the second pitch of his first plate appearance on Wednesday night, the 28-year-year old Alonso took a 97-mph fastball from Charlie Morton off his left wrist. He crumpled to the ground and immediately left the game, clearly in pain despite having protective padding on his left hand. An x-ray taken that evening showed that he hadn’t sustained a fracture, leading Alonso to tell reporters, “I feel like I dodged a bullet,” but subsequent CT and MRI scans revealed that he’d suffered a bone bruise and a wrist sprain. On Friday, the Mets placed him on the injured list retroactive to June 8, with the team announcing, “A typical return to play for this type of injury is approximately 3–4 weeks.” That timetable leaves the door open for Alonso to return right at the end of June in a best-case scenario, with early July more likely.

Though Alonso had homered in each of his previous two games, first off the Blue Jays’ Nate Pearson on June 4 and then off the Braves’ Bryce Elder on June 6, and though he trash-talked Elder after what was estimated to be a 448-foot shot, the hit-by-pitch didn’t appear to be intentional and wasn’t interpreted as such by its victim. Alonso had called out, “Throw it again! Throw it again, please!” but the Braves’ rookie didn’t take issue with the taunt, telling reporters, “I mean, if I hit one on the concourse, I might holler, too.”

Alonso stressed that he didn’t feel as though Morton hit him intentionally, telling reporters that Morton checked on him after the game. Via the Associated Press:

“He was looking for me… He just wanted to apologize. Obviously he didn’t mean to [hit me]. For people speculating for this or that, I just wanted to clear that. Chuckie’s a good guy and the situation didn’t call for it either. There’s nothing to it. I just happened to get hit with an up-and-in fastball.”

For Alonso, getting hit on the hand is nothing new. He missed six weeks due to a pitch-induced fracture of his left hand at High-A Port St. Lucie in 2017 and missed 10 days with a sprain after being hit in the right palm while with the Mets two years later. From his postgame comments:

“I’ve had broken hands before in the past, I’ve had wrist and hand contusions in the past. This happens pretty unfortunately regularly in my career,” he said. “That’s why I wear all my guards. I guess now I’ll be adding another layer of padding to the stuff that I use on a normal basis.

“Guys throw hard, they have nasty stuff that moves all over the place. Next time I’ll have a pad to protect more surface area.”

The injury interrupts what’s ben an exceptional season for Alonso, at least in the home run department. He homered 10 times in the Mets’ first 21 games, and after adding just three homers over the team’s next 21, went yard in four straight games from May 16 to 19, the first three of which came against the Rays, the last against the Guardians. He reached 20 homers on May 27, in the Mets’ 53rd game of the season, putting him on pace for 61 — a number of note given that Aaron Judge just beat the mark by a single homer last year. Though he’d fallen behind that pace before the injury, he was at a point where it wasn’t hard to get back on track; even slipping further behind would have left him with a legitimate shot of bettering his franchise record of 53 homers, set in 2019 (and still the rookie record as well).

Alonso hadn’t missed a game before getting hit by Morton, but even having sat out four now, he’s four homers ahead of Max Muncy, who’s second in the NL, and three ahead of Judge, who leads the AL but himself landed on the IL for the second time this season after spraining ligaments in his right big toe while making a spectacular, fence-busting catch at Dodger Stadium. So much for The Great New York Home Run Chase of 2023.

That said, Alonso is hardly hitting at a Judge-like level. His .231/.326/.546 is good for a 140 wRC+, tops on the team and in a virtual tie for 11th in the NL, but still three points short of his mark last year, when he hit .271/.352/.518, and four short of his carer high, set in 2019 when he hit .271/.352/.518. As those higher batting averages suggest, his offensive profile has shifted a bit in 2023. On the one hand, he’s been a more disciplined hitter than ever, with the lowest chases rate, swing rate, and swinging-strike rate of his career:

Alonso is chasing fewer than one-third of all pitches outside the zone for the first time in his career. His rate of swinging at pitches in the zone is down 12 percentage points from last year and 4.5 points below his lowest career mark. For the first time, his swinging-strike rate is below 10%, and his strikeout rate is the second-lowest of his career, with his walk rate an eyelash from matching his career high. He’s been particularly good at not chasing above the zone, but his swing rate is down all over the place:

The result has been a higher quality of contact… mostly. Alonso’s hitting more fly balls than ever, and while his average exit velocity is tied with last year’s mark as a career low, his barrel rate is at a career high:

Here it’s important to remember how much noise is included within average exit velocity. As Tom Tango reminded last week via Twitter, it’s better to look at the average velocity of the top 50% of a player’s batted ball events… if you can find it. Unfortunately Baseball Savant doesn’t make it easy to do so; it’s not on the Statcast player cards, and it’s not on our pages either, but Tango helpfully put together a custom table for this. The column “Best Speed” is that average, and for the big hitters, it’s above 100 mph; Judge is tops at 107.7 mph, followed by Ronald Acuña Jr. at 107.3, though he’s “only” fourth in average exit velo. Where it matters as far as Alonso is concerned is that while his 89.8 mph average exit velo places him in the 58th percentile, his 102.3 mph Best Speed is in the 78th percentile; within the player population, its standing is closer to his barrel rate, which has been the case for the course of his career:

Given the downward trend of Alonso’s annual EVs and Best Speeds, I’ll concede that I’m not sure how he’s produced a career-high xSLG, particularly when his 38.3% pull rate is also a career low (down six points from last year). But getting back to the table before this one, it is noteworthy that even in the post-shift era, Alosno’s batting average is lagging 42 points behind his xBA, and his slugging percentage is 50 points behind his xSLG. He really had been mashing the ball before he got hurt, even if his slash line looked a little different. Hopefully, the injury won’t sap his power — an all-too-common occurrence in the aftermath of wrist and hand injuries.

Unfortunately, Alonso’s injury comes at exactly the wrong time for the Mets, who when I last checked in on June 1 had climbed to within 3.5 games of first place at 30–27. They proceeded to score just five runs in three games against the Blue Jays, then blew leads of three runs for three nights in a row, which is a gruesome way to lose ground in a division race. In the last of those losses on Thursday, Justin Verlander gave up three first-inning runs, after which the Mets countered with five in the second off Spencer Strider. They led 8–5 after four innings and 10–7 after six, but Drew Smith served up a two-run homer to Travis d’Arnaud in the eighth, David Robertson surrendered a game-tying solo shot to Orlando Arcia, and then Tommy Hunter gave up a three-run walk-off shot to Ozzie Albies in the 10th. Good grief, Charlie Brown.

The Mets followed that by losing two out of three to the Pirates in Pittsburgh this past weekend, including a 14–7 drubbing on Friday night. They broke their losing streak — their longest since June 23–29, 2019 — with a 5–1 win behind Kodai Senga’s seven strong innings on Saturday, but fell back into the loss column with a 2–1 defeat on Sunday that knocked them down to 31–35. They’re fourth in the NL East, 9.5 games behind the Braves but only 2.5 games out of the third Wild Card spot. Where they had a 12.5% chance of winning the division and a 67.3% chance of making the playoffs as of June 1, they’re down to 2.2% for the division and 34.2% for the playoffs; no team in either league has lost more ground in that span.

With Alonso out, manager Buck Showalter has started Mark Canha and Mark Vientos twice apiece at first base, with the former picking up some additional innings via in-game moves. The 34-year-old Canha is hitting a modest .246/.330/.397 (105 wRC+) but has heated up since the start of May (.266/.349/.426, 121 wRC+); the 23-year-old Vientos, a rookie, has hit just .167/.200/.238 in 45 PA thus far. With Canha moving from his regular spot in left field, that’s opened up playing time for 35-year-old Tommy Pham, whose 122 wRC+ (.246/.326/.491) is fourth on the team behind Alonso, Francisco Alvarez (129), and Brandon Nimmo (125); he’s been particularly potent since the start of May (.279/.354/.588, 154 wRC+).

Still, it’s a tall order to hope that Pham can provide Alonso-like production. If the Mets are to absorb the loss of their big slugger over the next few weeks, they’ll need key players such as Francisco Lindor, Jeff McNeil, and every starting pitcher besides Senga and Max Scherzer (including Verlander) — all of whom have underperformed thus far — to step up. If they can’t get going, it will hardly matter how long it takes for Alonso to get back.