New York Mets: Pete Alonso makes Opening Day roster, where he belongs
By Kyle Morello
The New York Mets announced on Wednesday that first baseman and the number two prospect in the organization, Pete Alonso, will make the Opening Day roster. He’ll start the season where he always should have, which is in the majors.
The New York Mets have decided to include First Baseman Pete Alonso on their Opening Day roster, which is surprising to some people as they thought the Mets would play the service time game with the 24 year-old by sending him down to the minors for a couple of weeks.
The Mets have now done something right in consecutive days with their players with the Jacob deGrom extension preceding this, which to Mets fans is not only mind-boggling (in a good way), but almost unprecedented.
The fact of the matter is that this shouldn’t really be that much of a surprise, yet it is because the Mets front office usually tends to mess up these kinds of things.
Source: Pete Alonso has made the team. He'll be a member of the Mets' Opening Day roster.
— Anthony DiComo (@AnthonyDiComo) March 27, 2019
As promised, the Mets are starting Alonso in the Majors despite service time considerations. They were committed to carrying their best 25.
Pete Alonso is the most talented First Baseman on the Mets’ roster. I don’t even think that counts as an opinion, I think that is a bonafide fact at this point. He’s the #2 prospect in the Mets organization, and his main competition for the job was/is Dominic Smith. While Smith is talented and was a former top prospect himself, he is nowhere near the level that Alonso is at.
He has a clear knack for hitting the cover off of the ball, as he led the minors in homers a year ago. Despite some negativity surrounding his defense, he has actually been a solid defender over the last year and is only getting better.
The main argument to keep Alonso off of the Opening Day roster was so that his service time wouldn’t allow him to enter free agency a year early.
While this argument does make a lot of sense and has been used before (The Cubs with Kris Bryant in 2015), it shouldn’t get in the way of a team fielding its best 25 players to start a season. Mets General Manager Brodie Van Wagenen said this offseason that he wants the best 25 guys in the organization in Flushing to start the season, and he did exactly just that.
The question now will be if Alonso will start regularly at First Base or be in a righty/lefty platoon with Smith, who is a left-handed hitter and also had a pretty solid spring for the Mets.
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Whether or not he is the full-time starter, having Alonso make the team was the right call and shows that Mets are finally moving in the right direction with prioritizing winning over anything else.