Alonso Blasts 150th Career Home Run
By Rich Coutinho
The Mets got a much needed day off after being swept in Milwaukee by the Brewers and that was obvious today as Pete Alonso, Starling Marte and Francisco Lindor all crushed homers powering the team to a 9-3 win over the Miami Marlins. As an organization, the Mets are 41-21 in home openers including 11-4 here at CitiField. where they have won the home opener 8 times in the last 9 years.
While the Mets got power bats cooking today, it was the patience at the plate that got the team cooking as the 12 walks they drew was the fourth highest in any 9-inning game in team history. Brandon Nimmo got 4 free passes on this day lifting his total to 10 on the season, tops in the majors. Francisco Lindor said, “when we put that kind of traffic on the bases, it makes it hard to face the middle of our lineup and that is what we saw today.”
As much as the fact that the offense was clicking on all cylinders, Tylor Megill set the tone early giving his teammates six scoreless innings yielding only 3 hits joining Tom Seaver as the only hurler in franchise history to carve out those numbers in a home opener. Megill said, “It felt good out there as all of my pitches were working the way I wanted them to work. And the emotion of the home opener was a very uplifting experience.”
Uplifting is a great word to describe how Pete Alonso is stroking the ball. He has 4 homers on the season, including 3 in the last 2 games. He now has 150 career home runs and has reached that plateau faster than any baseball player in history aside from Ryan Howard of the Phils. He also moved into sixth place of the Met franchise home run list passing Carlos Beltran and is only 4 homers shy if Dave Kingman who is fifth on that Met list.
The sellout crowd at Citi rose to hit the roof when Alonso went yard and gave him another ovation when that massive new scoreboard showed a replay of the home run. One of the really underrated concepts in the game of baseball is beating the teams you should dominate and the Mets have won 4 of 5 early season games versus the Marlins. With a more balanced schedule in 2023, it becomes even more important to put games like this in the win column.
Before the game, the media had a chance to have an impromptu press conference with owner Steve Cohen in the Met dugout and he preached his belief in this roster acknowledging it is a long season but I am sure a day like this brought a big smile to his face. He has spent a ton of money on this roster and he needed a day like this to show his fans a clear illustration of what this team can do on a regular basis. Pitching depth on this roster is helping him deal with injuries as we saw from Tylor Megill and his lineup proved they can both play small ball and power a pitch over the fence at any given moment.
On Saturday, we get a chance to see more of that depth as Kodai Senga makes his first start at Citi after a brilliant performance in his debut in Miami a week ago. The day off on Thursday gives him an extra day of rest which will allow 6 days between starts. And that could be key as that is what he did while performing as a star pitcher while he was in Japan.
Opening day for the Mets saw the 43,590 that make a journey through the turnstiles to see a game that really brought all of the Met strengths to the eyes of every Met fan on this cool and breezy April day.
