Alonso so locked in he's making his hitting coach say, 'Whoa'

MINNEAPOLIS -- The most remarkable part of Pete Alonso’s start to the season is not the fact that he’s bashing homers with regularity, nor that he’s hanging around the National League leaderboards in RBIs and slugging, nor even that he’s played a sound defensive first base.

It’s that Alonso is batting .345.

He climbed to that lofty perch with a 2-for-2 performance Monday in the Mets’ 5-1 win over the Twins at Target Field, reaching base safely four times in total. Alonso’s RBI single in the third inning gave the Mets their first lead, and he later singled and scored the go-ahead run on a Mark Vientos double.

“I feel great at the plate,” Alonso said.

Juan Soto added a two-run homer to back starter Clay Holmes, who pitched five effective innings. But the only man on either side not to make an out was Alonso, who now has seven multihit performances in 16 contests.

“Game after game, it seems like [he’s] controlling the strike zone, aggressive on pitches in the strike zone, getting the barrel head out, making hard contact, using the whole field,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “He’s dictating at-bats right now.”

It’s certainly a departure from the norm for Alonso, who entered this year with a career .249 batting average, as well as a .229 mark the past two seasons combined. His career high is .271, set back in 2022. The last time Alonso hit over .300 was during a 65-game run at Double-A Binghamton back in 2018.

While Alonso’s average owes much of its gaudiness to the fact that the season remains young, dismissing the improvement entirely on the grounds of small sample size would mean ignoring the process behind it. Alonso is using the whole field better than ever, with more than two-thirds of his hits either going to right or straightaway center. That’s well above his previous career high. He’s also walking more frequently than he has in the past.

In terms of batting average, Alonso has never had a 16-game run this productive to start a season. In fact, this is his best 16-game run at any time of year since 2022.

None of this is to predict that Alonso will follow José Reyes and Jeff McNeil on the list of Mets batting champions; it’s simply an acknowledgement that his gains in the average department aren’t entirely luck-based. And if Alonso can return to his days of being even a .270 hitter, he will be a much more complete player than he’s been the past two seasons.

“I’ve been hitting the ball hard,” Alonso said. “Hit the ball hard consistently, good things happen.”

Batting average may not be the sexy statistic it was years ago, and it’s not one Mets hitting coach Eric Chavez cares much about. But it is a symptom of another thing Alonso has been doing exceptionally well: swinging at pitches in the strike zone and avoiding those outside of it. In Chavez’s estimation, the fact that Alonso’s on-base percentage is hovering at .464 -- 106 points higher than his previous career best -- means far more than his average.

“It just means he’s seeing the baseball,” Chavez said. “He’s able to recognize the spin, the pitches that are going to be in the zone, out of the zone.

“If he’s able to do that, everything else is going to take care of itself. The average is going to be good. It means he’s taking pitches, taking the close pitches. If you pay attention to his at-bats, just the way he is negotiating at-bats right now is, ‘Whoa.’”

Chavez pointed to Alonso’s two walks on Monday as Exhibits A and B. In the first of those plate appearances, Alonso took a first-pitch sinker just below the zone and refrained from chasing a two-strike fastball above it. That allowed him to work a six-pitch free pass. In the second, Alonso took a borderline first-pitch sinker, which set up the rest of the plate appearance for him.

“Those are probably at-bats where [in the past] he swings at a couple pitches and kind of gives those at-bats away,” Chavez said. “So I know it is early. The hits aren’t always going to fall for you … but if Pete can add just a little bit of that to his game, he’s going to be going to MVP talk in a hurry.”