NY Mets fans won't believe who hit the ball almost as hard as Pete Alonso last year

One of the best things about this time of year is diving into the numbers and learning something about a player you might have overlooked. Or in this case, a player the New York Mets would like to forget.

Baseball Savant's Hot Stove Dashboard is a great tool for taking a look at the Statcast data for the current free-agent class, and it should be no surprise that when it comes to hard hit rate, Pete Alonso ranks near the top. Alonso's 54.4% mark comes in third, behind only Kyle Schwarber and former New York Yankees sensation-turned-bust, Gary Sanchez.

But there in the rankings, just two spots beneath Alonso is one of the bigger Mets disappointments in recent memory, James McCann. Shockingly, McCann stung the ball 52.2% of the time, which might make you wonder where that guy was when he was in Queens.

Mets bust James McCann sits just behind Pete Alonso in free-agent hard-hit percentage rankings

Hopes were high for James McCann when the team handed him a four-year $40.6 million deal, in lieu of pursuing J.T. Realmuto as the solution behind the plate. At the time, McCann seemed like a player on the rise, earning an All-Star nod in 2019 with the Chicago White Sox and concluding his Windy City tenure with an .808 OPS, including the pandemic-shortened 2020 season.

Instead, McCann hit new lows in New York. He slugged an anemic .328 as a Met and compiled -0.4 bWAR during his tenure here. The Mets pulled the plug halfway through his deal, trading him to the Baltimore Orioles for a player to be named later and paying $19 million of his remaining $24 million salary just to be rid of him.

Obviously an abject failure, the deal goes down as one of the biggest missteps of the Steve Cohen era.

So now that he's smoking balls like Alonso does that mean he's actually good again? Not quite. The now-35-year-old McCann eventually latched on with the Arizona Diamondbacks and recorded 137 plate appearances over 42 games, slashing a respectable .260/.324/.431 in the process. It was his first OPS over .667 since 2020.

Those numbers are good, but small sample caveats apply, as does the fact that despite the similar hard hit rates, they're a far cry from what Alonso put up in 2025.

That just goes to show you there's more to offensive production than simply hitting the ball hard. You also have to hit it at the right angle to do damage, hit it where they ain't, and keep your walk and strikeout rates in check, among other things.

Catcher wasn't on the Mets' shopping list this offseason, the hard contact convinced the Diamondbacks to bring McCann back. Mets fans can't help but contain their chuckles.