Best player in the NL so far? Polar Bear has iced the competition

Pete Alonso, who spent a lot of the offseason not knowing whether he was going to be a Met this season or not, helped the Mets win another game, 4-3, on Wednesday afternoon at Citi Field. He knocked in the tying run in the bottom of the 10th with a double to right-center and then scored the winning run on a Starling Marte single as the Mets won their seventh in a row, on their way to having the best record in baseball by the end of the day.

There are a lot of reasons why they’ve come out of the gate this way, why they’ve started out 12-1 at home for the first time in team history. But none is bigger than the player known as the Polar Bear, who would be having the best April of anybody in New York City if it wasn’t for that Aaron Judge guy who plays for the Yankees.

Juan Soto, who used to bat ahead of Judge and now hits ahead of Alonso, hasn’t started to hit the way he can -- and the way he will -- yet. Francisco Lindor, hitting ahead of Soto, has been terrific. But it is Alonso who has been the Mets' best hitter so far, leading the team in just about everything, starting with a batting average of .341 through the victory over the Phillies that enabled the Mets to have that rousing 7-0 homestand before they head down to Washington to play the Nationals.

Alonso was speaking to reporters after Wednesday’s game, and talking about the holdovers from the Mets team that lost to the Dodgers in the National League Championship Series, and the players they’ve added since.

“It’s like we’ve [all] been playing together for years,” Alonso said.

But it is Alonso, who truly didn’t know if his Mets career had ended when last season did, who has done the most to lift the Mets to this kind of beginning. Judge, of course, has been a force of nature so far for the Yankees, with a .415 batting average, seven home runs, 26 RBIs, an OPS of 1.247 and all the rest of his stat line. Still: His performance hasn’t been able to completely overshadow, or obscure, what Alonso has been doing with the Mets.

There is the .341 average. He has six home runs and the same number of RBIs as Judge does and just eight fewer hits. His OPS so far is 1.121, and he’s slugging .681 to Judge’s dazzling .734. And it is always worth pointing out that since Alonso arrived in the big leagues in 2019 -- about to break the rookie home run record that Judge had set two years before (53 to Judge’s 52) -- Judge has hit a total of 239 regular-season home runs to Alonso’s 232. Alonso has played more games, absolutely, but that is part of his value, too. Over the six seasons before this one, the Polar Bear has missed a grand total of 24 games. And he hasn’t missed one this season. Because, let’s face it, who would want to sit out what’s happening with the Mets right now, even for a day?

“There’s so many guys here from the year before,” Alonso said on Wednesday.

Steve Cohen and Carlos Mendoza, Alonso’s manager, and all the Mets fans are over the moon that the first baseman from Tampa is still one of those guys. When I talked with Alonso one day during Spring Training, he said this about his free agency:

“I always felt that things would work out the way they were supposed to, that I’d end up where I was supposed to be.”

Where he was supposed to be is where he is right now, still at first base for the Mets, hitting behind Lindor and Soto. When the Mets needed a big hit against the Phillies to end the homestand, Alonso reached out against Jordan Romano and sent one between the outfielders in right-center, going to the opposite field the way he did in the ninth inning against the Brewers in Game 3 of the Mets-Brewers Wild Card Series last October. That was when he hit the home run off Devin Williams that saved the Mets season.

Then came an offseason that must have seemed longer to Alonso than baseball’s long regular season, one that included his home in Tampa being flooded by Hurricane Helene. Alonso, though, was able to joke during Spring Training that he and his wife had put in a new pool, “just one with salt water.”

But then Cohen placed a bet on perhaps the most popular homegrown player the Mets have had since David Wright -- one that might eventually pay off big for Alonso, as he is the one with a player option for 2026. So Alonso came back on a two-year deal, and now Year 1 of that deal looks the way it does so far. He is even playing a better first base than ever before.

“I’m glad I have him,” Mendoza said on Wednesday.

So, too, are Mets fans. There are other players in the National League having bear months. No one in the league has been more valuable so far than the Polar Bear. Back where he was supposed to be, back where he belongs.