Pete Alonso hit a baseball 414 feet into the Citi Field seats Tuesday night, off the Mets, the team that let him walk to Baltimore for $155 million instead of paying him to stay, and the crowd that spent seven years calling him theirs stood up and cheered for the other uniform.
That doesn’t happen in this sport anymore. It happened anyway, on a night the Mets lost.
The homer itself was a legitimate baseball event before anybody started clapping. Alonso’s solo shot off Kodai Senga in the top of the ninth tied the game at 3-3, and it was his 300th career home run, making him the 19th active player to reach that number. Per the Elias Sports Bureau, he’s also just the 20th player in AL/NL history to hit his 300th homer against the team that used to employ him, following Andrew McCutchen, who did it for the Pirates against the Phillies in 2024. Coby Mayo won it for real two innings later with an inside-the-park homer, and Baltimore escaped Queens 7-5 in 11 innings. But nobody’s talking about Mayo today.
They’re talking about what happened after Alonso rounded the bases. Mets fans started chanting his name and didn’t stop until he came back out of the dugout and tipped his cap: a curtain call, the kind reserved for a guy who still plays for you, given instead to a guy in gray road pants who’d just beaten their team.
https://twitter.com/MLB/status/2100037540208083284
That’s the part that gets me. Curtain calls are supposed to be tribal: you cheer your own guy, in your own park, on your own side of the score. A Mets crowd just split “the guy we used to root for” from “the team we’re rooting against tonight” into two separate things and acted on the distinction in real time, which I genuinely didn’t think a modern fanbase still knew how to do. Orioles manager Craig Albernaz clearly didn’t either: “I haven’t really seen a curtain call from a guy wearing gray pants, so that was kind of cool,” he said after the game. Mayo put it more bluntly: “That’s why you sign a guy like Pete, to come up in that spot and hit a huge home run.” Alonso himself stayed even-keeled about it: “There’s a lot of history here with me, and honestly, it doesn’t matter where and when. I just want to help the team win.”
I want to be honest about the part that keeps this from being a clean MLB Network feel-good package, because not everybody in that Mets clubhouse was feeling it. Sean Manaea wasn’t even on the mound for the homer and still sounded thrown by the whole scene: “To have that kind of reaction to an opposing player — could be anybody — is crazy to me,” he told reporters afterward. Senga, who actually served up the pitch, was more generous about it, saying through an interpreter that it just showed how much Alonso was loved. And once the Alonso chants died down, that same crowd pivoted straight into chanting “Fire Stearns” at team president David Stearns. So this wasn’t some blanket amnesty tour. It was specifically, surgically for Alonso, which if anything makes it stranger.
Worth remembering, too: his last visit to Citi Field didn’t go this smoothly, given Alonso’s gripes with the way replay reviews have gone against him in Queens this year. And this isn’t even the first Orioles standing ovation this year, so maybe Baltimore’s just collecting these now.
I’m a Yankees fan admitting a Mets crowd did something classy, and I don’t love how that sentence reads. Alonso’s 31, with plenty of career left, which means this wasn’t a farewell tour or a retirement lap. It was just a fanbase deciding, mid-season, that the guy who used to be theirs earned one more ovation before they went back to booing everyone else in that uniform.
Citi Field gave it to him anyway.
