Mets Monday Morning GM: Trade Pete Alonso and you sell the trust

The New York Mets got lucky at this trade deadline. The decision to sell continues to haunt some fans, however, the organization has received plenty of praise for pulling the bigger triggers and unloading Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander for legitimate prospects because Steve Cohen will continue to pay the pair.

Trade deadline sellers will typically rip out the hearts of fans. Not in this instance. Mets fans accepted the fate. Many are now excited to see what the prospects the club added can do in the big leagues. We wouldn’t feel the same if they traded Pete Alonso.

Mets rumors about a potential Alonso deal have been publicly known. It was Ken Rosenthal who dropped something more specific last week, mentioning the Milwaukee Brewers as a destination.

Good thing they didn’t go beyond field goal range. Alonso is a package deal. You trade him, you sell a large part of the trust you built with the fans. Bob Nightengale later piled on over the weekend, insisting that the belief is Alonso will in fact get traded this offseason.

The NY Mets will have an impossible time selling a Pete Alonso trade to the fans

Mets history isn’t flush with trading MLB players for prospects. They’ve had an especially tough time in recent years. Most of their success in this area took place in the 1980s when they were able to snag youngsters Sid Fernandez and Ron Darling in separate deals. More recently, Noah Syndergaard and Zack Wheeler fit in as two of the best minor leaguers the team has landed in a deal.

Just because something has failed in the past doesn’t mean you don’t try it again. It’s different with a player like Alonso. The Mets traded an older pitcher, R.A. Dickey, after winning the Cy Young in a deal for Syndergaard. It was Carlos Beltran, on an expiring contract, who was sent away for Wheeler. The earlier deals for players like Fernandez and Darling were a bit different as prospects tended to have less value and scouting didn’t seem as strong as it does today. Who else still has a closet with baseball cards claiming Jorge Toca is a future star?

Alonso will have another 40 home run, 100 RBI season. Already beloved by the fans, it’s hard to imagine replacing his production. The greatest of prospects can still fizzle out quickly. Some might stick in the big leagues but do it with far less tenacity than the Mets already know Alonso can bring them.

An offseason trade involving Alonso, however, does bring a little more intrigue. Sticking with the Milwaukee Brewers, what if the deal is headlined with one of their already established big league starting pitchers?

With any trade involving a fan-favorite, the newcomer runs the risk of having some added and unfair scrutiny. That’s a different story. Anyone who underperforms could suffer the same fate. It feels wrong to trade a productive fan-favorite in the first place. We know how those stories always go. Why sign up for it?

Alonso is a huge part of the Mets’ identity. It has been that way since 2019. Selling him for even the best prospect is eyebrow raising.

Fortunately, it doesn’t seem as if the Mets did much more than shoot the breeze with the Brewers. We’ve seen other trades with the Brewers fall apart at the deadline ala 2015. This is another and we’re all hopeful there’s no sequel.