It’s cool that we can quantify how important a single swing is to a player, a team, a game, and a potential trophy—especially with as bonkers a moment as Pete Alonso delivered in the Wild Card-clinching game against the Brewers on Thursday.
Alonso drove a 3-1 outside changeup 105 mph to right field, barely clearing a jutted-in wall at American Family Field. Landing 367 ft. from home plate, the ball would have exited the yard in only 13 out of 30 parks, Citi Field not among them. It was his shortest home run in 2024. But still! A home run is a home run—and sometimes even more.
How much more? Let’s consult the numbers.
By Win Probability Added (+63.9% WPA according to Baseball Reference), this was Alonso’s biggest play of 2024 and the second-biggest of his career. At the game level, his only bigger hit was a 10th-inning walk-off home run (+78.3% WPA) against the Tampa Bay Rays on May 17, 2023.
And while walk-off home runs are always cool, baseball history rarely gets written in May. So let’s look at it from a season level.
The Mets only recorded three bigger hits by WPA in 2024. Two were walk-off home runs: J.D. Martinez against the Miami Marlins on June 13 (72.4% WPA) and Brandon Nimmo against the Atlanta Braves on May 12. The other was Francisco Lindor’s go-ahead home run in the ninth inning of Monday’s playoff-clinching game against the Braves (+64.5% WPA)—and even then, just it was just barely bigger than Alonso’s home run by that metric.
But Lindor’s home run didn’t come in the playoffs, while Alonso’s did. So let’s take a look at where it stacks up among other postseason magic.
By Championship Win Probability Added (+7.99% cWPA), Alonso’s home run was the biggest play for the franchise since many Mets fans (including myself) were born. Gary Carter’s go-ahead double in the ninth inning of the 1988 NLCS against the Dodgers (+11.28% cWPA) is the most recent one that eclipses Alonso’s homer, but that came in a series the Mets ended up losing.
If we look at pivotal plays in series wins, next in line would be Keith Hernandez’s sixth-inning RBI single in Game 7 of the 1986 World Series, which by cWPA% (22.38%) is the most pivotal hit in Mets history.
If we look at just home runs, the list doesn’t go very long:
- Ray Knight: seventh-inning go-ahead home run in Game 7 of the ‘86 World Series (+21.58% cWPA).
- Lenny Dykstra: walk-off home run in Game 3 of the 1986 NLCS (+13.79% cWPA).
- Alonso: ninth-inning go-ahead home run in the 2024 Wild Card series.
What’s especially remarkable about this historical context is that this is a play that usually happens to the Mets.
In their history, the Mets have been involved in 14 home runs that delivered a cWPA at least as high as Alonso’s did on Thursday. Of those 14 home runs, a whopping 11 have come from the opposing team, many of which resulted in some of the biggest heartbreaks in the team’s history (Reggie Jackson, Kirk Gibson, Yadier Molina, Alex Gordon—we’re not going to get into details here, though).
And that’s only a little bit of the context that made Alonso’s home run so remarkable. We could get into his contract year, his slump, Devin Williams, this team’s recent futility playing in Milwaukee, the patchwork pitching, “OMG,” Grimace, a first-year manager…all of it!
But just by the numbers, Alonso’s moment already stands up as one of the greatest in the franchise’s history.
