Mets drop Pete Alonso in lineup for first time since 2020 as wild-card race heats up

New York Mets' manager Carlos Mendoza's lineup for his team's Monday makeup game against the St. Louis Cardinals features something not seen in almost four years – slugger Pete Alonso batting in the bottom half of the lineup.

Indeed, Mendoza's lineup has J.D. Martinez batting fourth, and Alonso meantime has been demoted to the five hole. It will mark the first time that Alonso has been in the lineup but batting below the cleanup spot since Sept. 26, 2020, when he was 25 years of age and in just his second big-league season. Alonso is coming off a sub-par but hardly disastrous July in which he had a .725 OPS. The slight lineup adjustment may be in response to a recent dry spell in which over the last five games the typically strong Mets offense has scored a total of just 16 runs.

"I want to win, and I trust (manager Carlos Mendoza) to run out the best lineup every single day. If that's what he thinks that's going to help us win, I'm all for it," Alonso told reporters Monday. "I'm on pace for close to 40 homers, I was an All-Star this year, to beat myself up or be frustrated -- it's really no use. I'm really excited for the end of the year where we get to play winning baseball. I'm happy with what I've accomplished this year so far."

Alonso has indeed enjoyed a productive season, as his 125 OPS+ will attest. However, that's down from peak levels. As well, his mental math is a bit off on his home run pace. Through 111 games – he's played in every Mets game thus far – he has 23 homers. Projected out to the full 162 games, that comes to 34 home runs for the year. That would be the lowest full-season homer tally of his career (he hit just 16 in 2020, but that season was heavily abbreviated to just 60 games because of COVID-19).

The backdrop to all this is that the 29-year-old Alonso is in his walk year, and that means he's headed for free agency this winter. There's been little material movement on an extension with the Mets, so the assumption is that Alonso will reach the market and perhaps land elsewhere for 2025 and beyond. Righty-righty first basemen tend to have a rough go of it on the free-agent market these days, and Alonso with signs of soft decline at the plate in tow may be acutely reminded of this soon enough. That's especially the case given that Alonso's apparent decline extends to his underlying batted-ball metrics.

As for Alonso's Mets, they enter the week with a record of 58-53 but having lost two games in a row. They're presently 1 1/2 games back of the Arizona Diamondbacks for the third and final wild-card spot in the National League. That means high-stakes stretch-drive baseball for the Mets, and for Mendoza that means pulling every lever he can -- even if it means dislodging the team's longtime cleanup hitter.