Pete Alonso hit two home runs Monday night in Baltimore’s 4-3 win over the Blue Jays. The second one put him at 40 for the season and in a club with exactly one member.
Per OptaSTATS, Alonso is the only player in baseball history to hit 40 or more home runs in his first season in the National League and 40 or more in his first season in the American League. He hit 53 as a Mets rookie in 2019. He has 40 in year one as an Oriole.
That is not a rounded-edges milestone or a stat cooked up to fill a graphic. It requires being an elite power hitter at the start of your career, switching leagues years later, and still being an elite power hitter. Almost nobody gets both halves right.
The Mets Are Going to Hear About This All Winter
New York did not want Alonso back. He left and signed a nine-figure deal with Baltimore, and all he has done is play every single day and mash.
He is at 304 career home runs. This is his fourth 40-homer season, after 53 in 2019, 40 in 2022 and 46 in 2023, and his first since that 2023 campaign. He leads the American League with 108 RBI. He is the 10th Oriole ever to reach 40 homers in a season.
The rest of the profile is arguably more impressive than the power. Alonso is carrying a career-best .359 on-base percentage and has drawn a career-high 78 walks. He has tied his career high in stolen bases, going 5-for-6. At 31, he is having the most complete season of his life.
The Mets, meanwhile, were never in the race. They reshaped the roster last winter specifically to avoid another late collapse, and instead built a team that was out of it early enough that a collapse was impossible. Watching Alonso slug 40 for somebody else is the kind of thing that follows a front office around.
Queens Already Told Us How It Feels
Alonso hit his 300th career home run on September 15 at Citi Field, a ninth-inning shot against his old team. Mets fans gave him a curtain call. In a visiting uniform. After he tied the game against them.
The first 264 of his 300 came in a Mets uniform, and he remains the franchise’s all-time home run leader. That curtain call was a fan base saying out loud what the organization would not.
Where This Leaves Him
Baltimore is not going to the postseason, which is the one thing missing from this story. Alonso did everything a club could ask of a free-agent slugger and it was not enough to drag the Orioles into October.
But strip the team result out and look at what he actually did. New league, new park, new division, brand new set of pitchers who had never faced him, and he put up 40 homers, an AL-leading RBI total, and the best plate discipline numbers of his career.
Power hitters are supposed to decline into their thirties. Alonso responded to a move he did not choose by having his best all-around year. The 40-homer split across two leagues is a nice piece of trivia, but the real headline is simpler: the Polar Bear is not slowing down, and the team that let him walk is watching from home.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.