The operative fact is that the Mets were eliminated from the playoffs on Monday. Everything about Pete Alonso's return to Queens this week as an Oriole is inseparable from that, in time but also in causation, to a subset of Mets fans. They gave him four separate standing ovations on Monday not only because he was a well-liked former player—and go ask a WFAN call screener from 2024 to see how ahistorical it would be to say he was universally beloved at the time—but because of what his absence from New York represents: a team with a $340 million payroll, again, that missed the playoffs, again.
By the end of Tuesday night, it was clearer that the Alonso lovefest wasn't entirely about Alonso. The big man homered off closer Kodai Senga in the ninth to tie the game, the 300th of his career, and he reacted by throwing his bat back toward the visitors' dugout like a Thracian peltast. And then, once Alonso had circled the bases, the real fun began.
A curtain call was requested, then demanded, then delivered. A road curtain call is a rare enough occurrence that MLB has a compilation video of a few recent ones; it's usually reserved for towering immortals like Mark McGwire, Albert Pujols, and of course Didi Gregorius. And then, for the second night in a row, the "Fire Stearns" chants started in the stands.
David Stearns has been the head of baseball operations since 2024, and 2024 remains his high-water mark. In what was supposed to be a "transitional" season the Mets overperformed and made it all the way to the NLCS. In 2025, the first year of Big Spending that was supposed to make them immediate contenders, they collapsed in June. This year's collapse happened before the end of April.
More specifically, given the circumstances, Stearns is the guy who attempted to replace Alonso's production at first base by getting cute, signing an older player with an extensive injury history and asking him to play a new position. Jorge Polanco ended up playing just 37 games this year, and the Mets have cobbled together the worst 1B production in the league. Meanwhile Alonso has put up his usual, all star–level production for Baltimore.
To a certain type of Mets fan—the type who might buy tickets just to cheer Alonso, perhaps—Stearns represents the front office nerd who thinks he can outsmart everyone. To them Stearns is behind the decision not to re-sign Alonso. He is a scheming vizier in Steve Cohen's ear claiming he can replace big production on the cheap. This surely isn't right. Alonso's relationship with the Mets was already on the rocks by 2024, and any decisions to not meet a player's asking price, or even seriously engage with it, are coming from above a GM. Thinking Stearns is the reason Alonso is no longer a Met is simplistic to the point of inaccuracy.
Blaming Stearns for this lost season has some more validity, and it didn't take Carl Jung to transfer that anger into cheers for Alonso's home run, even if it thwarted a Mets victory. This didn't sit well with current Mets, it seems. "As the 2026 Mets, I know we have definitely underperformed," said Sean Manaea, who started Tuesday's game for New York. "But we are—the guys in here work their ass off every single day, and to have that kind of reaction to an opposing player, could be anybody, is crazy to me."
"Pete's not here," Manaea continued. "He's just not here. So I know everybody loves him. He's the man. But yeah, he's not here. So to see the reaction from the fans like that, I don't know, it's just different."
(Senga, who served up the homer, seemed less bothered. "Because it was [Alonso], it didn't bother me. It just shows how much he was loved," he said through a translator.)
Regardless, locals have their call-in fodder for the next few days. A civil war between Mets fans is already brewing online. It's kind of a downer way to end the season, which though inarguably a failure has seen the Mets look younger and spunkier as it has worn on. There are some legitimately exciting rookies to look forward to, now, in Nolan McLean, Christian Scott, Zac Thornton, Carson Benge, and A.J. Ewing. It would probably be more healthy and constructive to turn the page completely and stop moaning about a player who didn't want to be there, and isn't. But "healthy" and "constructive" aren't really things Mets fans do. So, to honor their customs, I'll end this blog in more traditional LOLMets fashion. Here's how they'd go on to lose the game in the 11th:
