Pete Alonso still has time to turn around what’s been an ugly walk year.
Maybe playing in the same place where Aaron Judge had arguably the greatest season heading toward free agency of all time will get the first baseman going.
Alonso entered Wednesday’s game against the Yankees at the Stadium with just one homer in his previous 69 plate appearances before he took Gerrit Cole deep for a two-run homer in the top of the fourth of a 12-3 win.
It was Alonso’s 20th homer of the season, still well off his typical pace.
Alonso has never hit fewer than 37 home runs in a full season and he entered Wednesday with a career-worst rate of homering in just 4.4 percent of his plate appearances.
For the most part, it’s been a desultory year for Alonso.
Prior to his two-hit game in the series finale in Miami over the weekend, the first baseman was mired in an 11-for-57 funk with just three extra-base hits in 15 games that dropped his OPS from .811 to .767.
But Alonso reached base three times in Miami on Monday and had two more hits and a double in Tuesday’s win in the Subway Series opener in The Bronx.
Then he hit one of the three homers the Mets belted off Cole. He also walked in the eighth after the Mets had built an insurmountable lead.
They went deep five times overall against what’s been a feeble Yankees’ pitching staff of late.
It’s clear the Mets are a team to be reckoned with for the rest of the season and Alonso has gone from a player that said he didn’t want to be traded — when it looked like the Mets might be sellers at the July 30 deadline — to someone they will rely upon to provide his usual power down the stretch, regardless of who they acquire by Tuesday’s deadline.
“We put ourselves in a better position than where we were in May,” Carlos Mendoza said before the game.