How Much Longer Until Pete Alonso Or The Mets Blink?

For more than a quarter-century now, Yankees fans have associated Thanksgiving with the unexpected return of Bernie Williams.

The perpetually under-appreciated homegrown centerfielder (remember, it’s the Core Four of Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera instead of a Fab Five that would include Williams) seemed destined to end up with the rival Red Sox until George Steinbrenner upped the ante on Nov. 25, 1998 — Thanksgiving Eve — by offering Williams a seven-year deal worth $87.5 million. Williams played the remainder of his career with the Yankees, who retired his number 51 and unveiled his bust in Monument Park in 2015.

All of which is to say the Mets and Pete Alonso are running out of holidays on which they can dramatically reunite.

The path to a potential reunion between the Mets and Alonso is both simpler and more complicated than the one navigated by the Yankees and Williams 26 years ago.

There isn’t much fence-mending to do in Queens, where both sides have been professional in their public comments since Alonso turned down a seven-year, $158 million deal in 2023 before hiring Scott Boras as his agent. Alonso has repeatedly said he’d like to finish his career with the Mets while president of baseball operations David Stearns said he’d “…love to bring Pete back” even after spending $765 million to lure Juan Soto across town.

There were no warm words between the Yankees and Williams when he declined a five-year, $37.5 million extension in 1998.

“This is star money for a non-star player,” then-general manager Bob Watson said of Williams, who won the AL batting title in 1998 while winning the second of his four straight Gold Gloves.

There’s no doubt Alonso is viewed as a star player by the Mets — albeit one who is not nearly as well-rounded as Williams was a generation ago. While Alonso already ranks third in team history with 226 homers, he’s a .249 career hitter who has posted an identical OPS+ of 123 in each of the lat two seasons — the lowest full-season OPS+ of his career. He’s also been worth -4.5 WAR at first base, per Baseball Reference.

He’s also 30 years old, an age at which first basemen with Alonso’s skill set (there’s a phrase Mets fans heard a lot in 1998) tend to begin declining. Stearns has been nothing but complimentary about Alonso, but he’s as unemotional when it comes to contractual matters — especially involving a player whom he inherited — as he is polite in interpersonal dealings.

And while Steve Cohen has given Stearns an almost limitless budget, he’s also provided Stearns the type of independence a Mets general manager hasn’t experienced since the pre-Wilpon days. Stearns is already at the point where he can afford to blink, pivot to a lower-cost alternative and retain the goodwill he’s built up over the last 14 months.

For Alonso, blinking first would be an acknowledgment he misread the potential market for first basemen in 2023 and underline the reality he left tens of millions of dollars on the table. Alonso — and Boras — have a lot more to lose, perception-wise, than the Mets, who, with the end-of-year-holidays in the rearview mirror, can afford to wait until another big day to make a decision here. Can Alonso?