Bill Madden: Everybody’s happy Pete Alonso is back with Mets, but Polar Bear needs big season

So Pete Alonso is back with the Mets and everyone is happy.

The Polar Bear is happy because he never wanted to leave the Mets, especially after he grudgingly came to realize he didn’t have a market. Steve Cohen is happy because he got to appease Mets fans in bringing back their favorite son — at his price. David Stearns is happy because the Alonso contract is within his analytics creed of three or fewer years. And Scott Boras is happy because even though he failed mightily on his promise to get Alonso substantially more than the seven years, $158 million offer from the Mets he turned down in June 2023, he was able to save face by getting him an AAV of $30 million for 2025 that is the highest of any first baseman in the game.

But make no mistake, unless Alonso has a dramatic turnaround season in 2025, his ability to opt out after the first year of the two-year, $54 million deal will be moot. He never realized he had so much going against him in this negotiation with the Mets: (1) He was coming off his worst season, (2) all the metrics showed player in decline, and (3) he was shackled by a qualifying offer from the Mets and no teams were willing to shell out a big bucks 5-6 year contract for a 30-year-old one dimensional first baseman — and also sacrifice a second and fifth round draft pick as compensation to the Mets. At least if he decides to opt out after this season, the qualifying offer goes away, but he’ll be a year older with the same negatives.

A good “one dimensional” comparison to Alonso in 2024 is Chris Carter, the hulking first baseman for the Brewers in 2016. Alonso hit 34 homers, struck out 172 times and had an OPS of .788 last year. When Carter was 30 in 2016, he hit .222 and led the majors with 206 strikeouts, but also led the league in homers with 41, drove in 94 runs and had an OPS of .821. Yet at the end of the season he was released by the Brewers. And the GM who released him was David Stearns.

That should give Alonso a pretty good idea where he’d still be right now if Cohen hadn’t bowed to the pleas of Mets fans. And you have to believe Stearns was also looking forward to those qualifying offer compensation draft picks once Alonso signed elsewhere. Indeed, the players have come to realize what a handicap these qualifying offers can be to their free agency. Maybe not for the top tier players like Juan Soto, Max Fried and Corbin Burnes, but second tier players like Alonso find their markets limited as so many of baseball’s analytically-inclined GMs today are fiercely protective of their draft picks.

Somewhat surprisingly, the owners actually offered to do away with qualifying offers late in the 2022 collective bargaining negotiations with the players in exchange for an international draft, but the union flatly rejected it. The reason, I was told, was the Latin players are particularly opposed to it after the buscones in their native countries convinced them they could get so much more on the open market.

IT’S A MADD, MADD WORLD

When it comes to that much-anticipated, much-debated new domed stadium for the Tampa Bay Rays in St. Petersburg, you can kiss it goodbye. Now the question is whether Tampa Bay will also be kissing the Rays goodbye themselves. No one is saying it out loud, but it’s become clear Rays owner Stu Sternberg has concluded the unfeasibility of going through with his share of $700 million for the planned $1.3 billion redevelopment plan in the Historic Gas Plant District of St. Petersburg next to the Rays’ present hurricane ravaged Tropicana Field home. “Having the money and putting it in are two different things,” Sternberg told the media at the owners meetings in Palm Beach last week. Privately, Sternberg told the owners because of the delays in approving the bonds for the stadium which will incur an estimated additional cost of $150 million, the St. Pete deal is all but dead. And apparently St. Pete mayor Ken Welch, the driving force behind the new stadium, which would be the centerpiece of a massive redevelopment project, is OK with that. “We will not pursue a deal at any cost,” Welch said last Tuesday. “The greatness and future of St. Pete does not depend solely on this deal.” At least St. Pete officials have finally come up with a timeline and approved the funds to repair hurricane-damaged Tropicana Field for the start of the 2026 season. For this season, the Rays will be playing their home games at Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, where I’m told, the season and group sales tickets are nearly all sold out despite the Rays doubling the price. What needs to happen now is for Sternberg to sell the team — Rays fans are tired of him investing nothing in the team and constantly trading off their best players when they start to become expensive. But bleak and uncertain as things seem right now, Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred does not want to lose Tampa Bay, the No. 11 media market, which is why the hope is for a deep pocket owner (or owners) from Tampa to emerge and the Tampa stadium plan near Ybor City can be revived. “That’s where the Rays need to be,” a baseball person who grew up in Tampa told me. “Ybor City, walking distance from the stadium, would become one of the great attractions in the country. It would be home run for everyone.” Also, waiting in the wings is the Orlando Dreamers group, organized by the late Orlando Magic CEO Pat Williams and Hall of Famer Barry Larkin, who’ve working tirelessly to bring major league baseball to the Magic Kingdom.