Raise Me Up, Patrick Mazeika
Pete Alonso stumbled — but Patrick Mazeika helped bring him back to his feet.
Besides Pete Alonso attempting to jump over the dugout fence and falling like the fourth stooge, Patrick Mazeika’s walk-off fielder’s choice was the highlight of Tuesday night’s game against the Orioles. Down 2-0 going to the bottom of the eighth, the Mets scored a run on a Michael Conforto RBI single before Pete Alonso grounded into a double play. In the ninth, after Kevin Pillar seemed to homer before his fly down the left-field line was ruled foul, he and Jonathan Villar singled. James McCann took one for the team by striking out, thus avoiding a double play, and Dominic Smith hit a flyball to right field that, off the bat, looked like a double, then a flyout, but somehow fell for a single between Cedric Mullins and Austin Hays. Pillar scored; Villar went to third on the throw. Mazeika came up, and on a wild pitch, Smith went to second, taking the double play off the table.
The stage was set. Mazeika tapped a slow ground ball to Trey Mancini at first. Mancini, playing in, threw home. At third, Jonathan Villar — who, people seem to forget, once stole 62 bases in a season, and for goodness’ sake, stole 40 when he played 162 games in 2019 — took off on contact. Mancini’s throw was a little high; Villar slid under it, easily safe. As the Mets charged toward Mazeika between first and second, he untucked his jersey, all the easier to rip off. After all, he’s used to this by now.
The celebratory charge wasn’t without obstacle: Pete Alonso and David Peterson, but especially Pete Alonso, fell spectacularly in the jump over the dugout fence. It was the kind of thing you’d see in an SNL sketch, where what’s going on in the foreground is suddenly nothing to the nonsense going on in the background. Patrick Mazeika was celebrating, but behind him, suddenly Pete Alonso was hitting the ground like a cannonball, landing and compressing in on himself but not bouncing up, absorbing the fall like he was made of Vibranium. But then, if you watch the video, he looks up and sees Mazeika, and he immediately pulls himself up as if nothing has happened and runs forward to join in the celebration.
Alonso himself, actually, had a disappointing game. He singled in the fourth, but didn’t have another hit. He popped out in foul territory with men on first and third in the sixth, when a productive out could have brought home the first run of the game; in the eighth, with men on first and second and the Mets down by a run, Alonso, facing a pitcher who had already walked two in the inning, swung at the first pitch and grounded into an inning-ending double play.
Alonso has an .813 OPS on the season, which isn’t terrible, but it’s far below his true talent level. The home runs will come; he has five, which is more than none, but besides a brief stretch early in the season, he hasn’t squared up the ball like we know he can. Alonso is clearly seeing the ball well enough — his OBP is .360 — and it’s only a matter of time before he has a Lucas Duda-esque stretch and hits seven home runs in six games. The same is true of Francisco Lindor and Michael Conforto and, to a lesser extent, Dom Smith — now that they’ve broken out of their funks, they’re all swinging as well as they ever have, and we just wait for their luck to turn for the better.
That’s especially true of Alonso, though, because you sometimes get the sense that he’s never shown us what he’s truly capable of. Even in 2019, when he hit 53 home runs and put up a .941 OPS, his season-long BABIP was .280, even though his average exit velocity was in the 76th percentile league-wide. In 2021, the story is similar, albeit not quite as bad: Alonso is at the top of the exit velocity leaderboards, but his BABIP is a pedestrian .306. The home runs will come, though, and when they do, opponents will have nothing to do but watch them fly.
The thing about Alonso right now is that he looks like he always has, which is a good thing. He’s not driving himself crazy or overthinking his swing; he’s just taking his at-bats, and he hasn’t quite gotten lucky so far. As long as Alonso’s swing looks like Alonso’s swing, it’s good news for Mets fans. Of course, he can still have bad games while swinging well, as happened yesterday; that happens to everyone. That’s when the rest of the team can pick up the slack. When Pete Alonso trips and falls, sometimes he needs Patrick Mazeika to help him back to his feet.