PHILADELPHIA — Pete Alonso deflects the questions regularly, insisting he is focusing on the small rather than the big.
He says he eyes the next pitch or the next play rather than the next offseason.
Plenty of people around him will acknowledge that such myopia is ideal but fairly impossible.
“The business side will take care of itself, and there’s no doubt in my mind it’s gotten to him this year,” co-hitting coach Eric Chavez said Thursday in the wake of the most significant swing of Alonso’s career. “I don’t care what anybody says. I don’t care what he says. It has to — he’s human.
“The want-to and the desire to go and put up a big year for himself and for the city, sometimes the want-to is just too much. But he stuck it out.”
Alonso endured a solid season for others and a below average year for him at a significant moment in his life, ready to hit free agency after the season.
If he carried that weight with him through a campaign in which he played all 162 games but hit .240 with a .788 OPS and 34 home runs, he did not admit it.
His platform season did not launch him into a different stratosphere of MLB money-earners the way Aaron Judge’s 2022 season did.
Or at least, Alonso has not made that leap yet.
Alonso struggled particularly in clutch situations all season, hitting .232 with runners in scoring position and posting just a .525 OPS in “late and close” moments — defined predominantly as the seventh inning or later in which the batter’s team is behind by three runs or fewer, tied or ahead by one run.
He just didn’t come through with enough big hits — and then was granted absolution in the most gargantuan moment of his career.
Alonso’s three-run home run with one out in the ninth inning in Milwaukee, which essentially halted any Mets vacation plans and ensured they would be at Citizens Bank Park on Saturday for the start of the NLDS, might have been the biggest swing in Mets history and certainly was in Alonso history.
The home run bought Alonso another series in a Mets uniform, at least one more home game at Citi Field and another chance at finding an eye-opening payday on the open market.
“At the end of the day,” Francisco Lindor said in the celebratory clubhouse, “if Pete does this in the postseason, he’s going to get paid.”
The opportunity is again in front of Alonso, who seized it Thursday.
He is a powerful bat and a capable one, but he did not declare himself a must-have bat during his subpar regular season.
After putting the Mets on his back once, what if he does it again in the NLDS?
NLCS?
World Series?
“He knows he’s one of the best hitters on the planet,” Chavez said. “[This regular season was] not ideal for him or whatever, but everything is going to change moving forward for him.
“Hopefully he’ll slam the door on this whole thing — who cares about what happened this year? Now it’s about what he does in his at-bats in the next two or three weeks.”