Seems Boras has put Alonso in a corner with an asking price that exceeds what any team is willing to pay. Kudos to the Mets for being realistic but the fans still feel jerked around. Give Alonso a deadline with the best offer and then say good bye if he balks. Toronto, SF and Seattle could all use Alonso’s bat but it would be easier to sell it to their fan base if he was the last piece of the puzzle instead of just one more bat. And he won’t get the same chances to be in the post season with the way those three teams are expected to finish in the standings. And his best chance for additional income would seem better in NY but that might just be the Met fan in me talking.
He does not deserve to be the highest AAV first baseman and it’s not like $70-80 million over three years won’t allow him to secure the Alonso family for generations to come. Time for Alonso to sh*t or get off the pot.
At this point I am just annoyed with the amount of clickbait out there for Mets fans. These nothing burger articles claiming to have "Breaking News" about Pete Alonso. The Mets lineup as it stands is not great.
Lindor, SS
Soto, LF
Vientos, 3B
Nimmo, RF
Marte, DH
Winker, 1B
Alvarez, C
Siri/Taylor, CF
McNeil, 2B
or
Lindor, SS
Soto, LF
Vientos, 1B
Nimmo, RF
Winker/Marte, DH
Baty, 3B
Alvarez, C
Siri/Taylor, CF
McNeil, 2B
It's made much better by adding in someone like Alonso, who can shift Winker back to a part time DH/Spot Starter role and pushes Nimmo and others back to spots in the lineup we are happier seeing them. I just want Alonso off the market so I can stop reading about him. I also want to stop hearing about the Mets trading for a potential mid-tier replacement in Mountcastle or Torkelson.
If Alonso is a no, I would love the Mets to see how little they could give up/pay for Arenado to finish out his career with them. I think Arenado can do better than his 2024 and his 2024 numbers weren't dreadful.
This offseason has been exhausting. With the Juan Soto sweepstakes, the Roki Sasaki nonsense and now the Alonso mishigas. I'm just ready for it to be done.
When I open up a browser on my tablet, it shows me a host of stories based on topics I've visited recently. And they're 95% or more click-bait articles. It's easier to write those headlines and articles than it is to write a compelling, fact-based piece.
I will see a story in my feed and simply go to MLB Trade Rumors to see if they've published something new. I figure they are my "Is there smoke?" test.
(3) This offseason is ripe to be done. Let's get into some baseball!
Perhaps another topic, but if these are your proposed line-ups, I'd offer that it actually looks a bit better if Soto is hitting third rather than second. I like Lindor-Nimmo-Soto-Vientos-McNeil-Alvarez . . .
Dave, you are right, it us not a great lineup. A lot of potential duds in there. What if, Winker wakes and is Winker again? What if McNeil continues swinging a wiffle bal bat? What if Nimmo's health issues drag him down? To many hopes and wishes with the real propensity to crash and burn.
Until Pete signs somewhere, the battle for whats going on will be in the press, and it stinks. The fact is I think the Mets are better with Pete (for a stretch of time) at 1B, and Pete is definitely much with the Mets.
I think its important to say that Pete is in no way over the hill. Decline years sure, but a guy that posts every day for work and consistently bangs 35+ HR does have value, and I believe can provide that kind of result for years to come. It strikes me that the pissing war of "who won" is a patently bankrupt way for the media to cover this.
Pete needs to wake the hell up.
#1 His old agent crew, whom he had forever, organized the exact deal he would take in a heartbeat right now at 7/158. The Mets delivered what would have been a poorly aging contract Pete rejected of his own free will to test free agency and all the randomness inherent to it. As I recently read, Pete picked up Boras shortly after Nimmo, a Boras client, swindled the Mets for his contract that the team will eat (why dont we talk about the Nimmo contract much? Its a stone cold loser for the team.) Did Nimmo recommend Boras after his successful deal? Regardless, Pete and Boras have wildly mismanaged his value.
#2 No one is going to come forward with a deal better than whatever the Mets offered. He continues to make terrible decisions that at every turn are costing him millions, and painting himself as a person no one else sees.
#3 Cohen and Stearns are running a business, but there is blame to lay here too. As refreshing as it was to hear Cohen bat down the boo-birds at Amazin Day, he came dangerously close to a violation of the CBA in disclosing info about contract negotiations. Futhermore, the comments made Pete unnecessarily look bad, and could have spoiled the pot for any other team. Yes, Cohen has a funding limit, but I do not believe the parties are so far apart that there isnt a middle ground where both can celebrate an outcome and avoid the LOL Mets tag thats surely around the corner.
#4 Git R Dun. Im sick of it. Pete: Wake the hell up and make some concessions - here's the deal, when you are in a hole stop digging. Cohen/Stearns: Wake the hell up and make some concessions. He is never going to be offered more than 3 years and theres hardly any deal in the 23-27M AAV that can be so onerous to your vast fortune that it looks like you are flinging turds out of your cage just for spite.
I absolutely agree that Alonso has real value. But that value is in the $20 million dollar range, which isn't chump change. The other day I suggested 1/$23, as an olive branch to the Alonso camp, offering him more than the QO that he declined.
It's too soon to talk about the Nimmo contract in a bad-mouthing way. While he had a drastic dropoff in performance last year, he's still provided excess value in the first two years of his deal. Now, if he falls off even more in 2025, then he's fair game.
My opinion is that Cohen didn't come close to violating the CBA with his comments. We didn't hear a hint of a whisper that the MLBPA was considering taking action. It was just rampant speculation by newspaper columnists.
Nimmo is being oaid through age 37, for a guy with a major foot issue and other injuries. I struggle to see talking about Petes decline in ages 30, 31, and 32 across a 3-yr contract. Thats way off base to me. I think you avg 2-3 bWAR for 4+ years still, with an individual great or poor year sprinkled in.
You want so much to label Nimmo as injury-prone yet he's played 150 games each of the past three seasons.
Nimmo's stats fell off in the second half of last year, in part due to the plantar fasciitis. We have no idea if the p.f. will continue to affect him this year. Maybe it will. Or maybe he'll hit like he did in the first half of 2024 over an entire season.
Regardless of how Nimmo fares, he's already under contract. And the real question is if they should add a big-money deal to Alonso. You think that because Cohen is rich, he should gladly pay XX money over three years. And I think the Mets should be very conservative with the money they send his way, given his past two years and the plethora of non-athletic 1B who've cratered at a similar age.
Off the top of my head there's Chris Davis, Glenn Davis, Adam Dunn, Richie Sexson and Mo Vaughn. And I know you don't place value on human comps. But just because you don't doesn't mean the rest of the world feels that way. There have been zero reports that any team besides the Mets has offered Alonso a contract. Don't you think Boras and his flunkies in the press would have leaked a proposal if they had one?
If he's so incredibly valuable - above and beyond what I think or what Stearns apparently thinks - why hasn't another team signed him? At some point what I think or what you think or anyone else here thinks is irrelevant. The market will decide what he's worth. And the market is awfully quiet right now.
Look you can pull any window out you want for Nimmo career injury status. I could easily say that in the prime of his baseball life he played 69, 55, and 92 games per season. The fact is, Nimmo is an injury risk and we are dealing with injury this very minute. He's averaging about 118 games per season through his career (excluding year 1 and 2020).
Im not proposing that Cohen starts weeping like a baby and give Pete the 7/158 contract he passed on by any means. I am saying that there is a little room to give the guy contract that is market competitive and a bit appreciative for the dynamism he brings to the fan base and respect for being RoY and a 4x AS when he was making peanuts. So I can sleep at night giving him a market deal for 3 years at 23 AAV and add 1M/yr on that for 24M/yr and 72M total. He can opt out at years 1 and 2, or Mets can opt in and increase the AAV to 25 for the remaning 2 years. He should not get Freeman money at 27M/yr. But in the end you are talking about 69 or up to 74M. I just cant see that being any part of a worry for Cohen.
So, let's ignore what Nimmo's done the last three years. And let's also put the games played in the Covid year and act like playing in 92% of the team's games is some awful total. Got it.
But somehow, I'm not going to put a huge value on the number of games Nimmo played in 2019, much like I'm not going to put a huge value on the production of Alonso in 2019, either. What the players have done the past three seasons has a lot more to do with how they'll perform in the future than what happened six years ago. Ancient history.
Billionaires don't stay billionaires by pissing away millions of dollars year after year after year. Cohen doesn't want to pay $90-$110 million annually in Luxury Tax payments and he doesn't want to pay over-inflated dollars for a declining first baseman.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it.
I took out the games played in year 1 and 2020, like I said. Nimmo is injured right now. He is a delay for ST, and hopeful for opening day. It is what it is.
I'll never cry a drop for Cohen and his money, or his apparently big mouth. We are talking about a few millions of dollars, Starbucks money, to possibly get a deal done that makes the Mets better, makes fans happy, brings in money though attendance and merch. But forget that, it was Cohen himself that said he wanted to be the Dodgers East. He blew 80M$ on 2 lousy old fart pitchers who played so little for the team that I would barely say either were Mets. Those 2 contracts alone he payed as dead weight are more than a proposed contract for 3 years of Alonso with 100+ more HR, 250+ RBI, and 6-8 bWAR etc.
Perhaps Alonso should get Freeman money at $27M. Freeman is obviously the better player but is he worth that much more to the Dodgers than Alonso is to the Mets when this team really needs a strong bat to become relevant? In 2024 Freeman hit 10.92% of the Dodgers' RBIs and 10.47% of TBs while Alonso hit 11.97% of the Mets' RBIs and 12.20% of TBs. The Dodgers can replace Freeman's production more easily than the Mets can replace Alonso's.
I like the idea of the one year deal so both sides can have another year to validate themselves. A 1 year/27 million contract should be satisfying for everyone. Alonso gets the biggest salary of his life and Stearns gets the future flexibility that he wants while avoiding accusations that he gave up on the playoffs over a few million dollars.
We've advanced past judging pitchers by Wins. Next step is to stop judging hitters by RBIs. Come join us in the 21st Century. Look at WAR or OPS or wRC+ or WPA.
And if you absolutely must use RBIs - you need to look at it as more than half a stat. A player's RBIs depend on his teammates and how many times he comes to bat with runners on base. Alonso batted last year with 431 runners on base, the fourth-most in MLB. Despite all of the HR, he did not finish with the fourth-most RBIs. His 12.53 RBI% was below average.
It's pretty easy to see why fans over value Alonso. They're still viewing the game thru basic stats that are no longer the way people in front offices view the game.
Because I can't help myself, I'll inject myself into this discussion. I tend to be in Chris's camp with regard to the Pete situation. While I understand that good economics are not bidding against yourself and overpaying for things, but Pete has given the Mets a hell of a lot more value over the last 6 years than he will ever get back from them. I am not a billionaire, but once in a while I will pay for a Sam Adams Holiday Fest when I could go the economical route and get a Bud Lite. I am not broke yet. And yes, Steve 'wasted' a ton of money paying down contracts of players that were on other teams . . Schertzer, Verlander, McCann.
I'd also say that a lot of players have had down years and bounced back to be productive into and through their thirties. Even Adam Dunn hit 75 homers in his age 32 and 33 years together.
I'd say give Pete a chance - I am not advocating a 5 or 7 year deal, but a three year deal for even $24 or $25M does not seem to be too much spend on a guy that has been a backbone of the resurgence of the Mets in this decade.
Mets need one more bat. That's either Alonso or Bregman unless there's a trade out there.
Seems like Toronto is Alonso's only other landing spot as DH for a year and then Vlad Jr.'s replacement in '26. With light demand, I think there's a reasonable chance Alonso returns to the Mets on their terms: 3/70 with no opt-outs. But that might not be until pitchers and catchers report to Port St. Lucie.
One more bat. Well said. Pete being a DH for a year won’t help him maintain the fielding skills he does have. And how much more could Toronto being willing to pay him. I’m with Cohen on Alonso as I am honestly so sick of this waiting game. It’s not fair to us die hard fans. Boras does get his clients top dollar, but don’t any of those players know when to tell their agent to get a life and let’s get this done?
Just tossing my take in here, since there’s clearly a deficit of opinions out there. I do wish that the press could do even more rehashing of old news and baseless speculation. LOL. My view is that they may not be hung up on the money as much as who has the leverage on years 2 and 3. Pete wants to be able to opt out if he has a monster 2025. Can’t blame him. The Mets don’t want to be on the hook for 2026 if his downward trend continues. I don’t think a few million bucks is the issue right now. If I had to guess, Pete signs a one year deal sometime before ST for close to $30M, with no strings attached for 2026 in either direction. For the record, I think Pete created this pickle he’s in for himself when he turned down the 6-7-year deal and signed Boras. I’d like to see him in the 2025 lineup but he’s not owed anything by the Mets anymore than he owes the Mets a hometown discount.
Seems Boras has put Alonso in a corner with an asking price that exceeds what any team is willing to pay. Kudos to the Mets for being realistic but the fans still feel jerked around. Give Alonso a deadline with the best offer and then say good bye if he balks. Toronto, SF and Seattle could all use Alonso’s bat but it would be easier to sell it to their fan base if he was the last piece of the puzzle instead of just one more bat. And he won’t get the same chances to be in the post season with the way those three teams are expected to finish in the standings. And his best chance for additional income would seem better in NY but that might just be the Met fan in me talking.
He does not deserve to be the highest AAV first baseman and it’s not like $70-80 million over three years won’t allow him to secure the Alonso family for generations to come. Time for Alonso to sh*t or get off the pot.
At this point I am just annoyed with the amount of clickbait out there for Mets fans. These nothing burger articles claiming to have "Breaking News" about Pete Alonso. The Mets lineup as it stands is not great.
Lindor, SS
Soto, LF
Vientos, 3B
Nimmo, RF
Marte, DH
Winker, 1B
Alvarez, C
Siri/Taylor, CF
McNeil, 2B
or
Lindor, SS
Soto, LF
Vientos, 1B
Nimmo, RF
Winker/Marte, DH
Baty, 3B
Alvarez, C
Siri/Taylor, CF
McNeil, 2B
It's made much better by adding in someone like Alonso, who can shift Winker back to a part time DH/Spot Starter role and pushes Nimmo and others back to spots in the lineup we are happier seeing them. I just want Alonso off the market so I can stop reading about him. I also want to stop hearing about the Mets trading for a potential mid-tier replacement in Mountcastle or Torkelson.
If Alonso is a no, I would love the Mets to see how little they could give up/pay for Arenado to finish out his career with them. I think Arenado can do better than his 2024 and his 2024 numbers weren't dreadful.
This offseason has been exhausting. With the Juan Soto sweepstakes, the Roki Sasaki nonsense and now the Alonso mishigas. I'm just ready for it to be done.
When I open up a browser on my tablet, it shows me a host of stories based on topics I've visited recently. And they're 95% or more click-bait articles. It's easier to write those headlines and articles than it is to write a compelling, fact-based piece.
I will see a story in my feed and simply go to MLB Trade Rumors to see if they've published something new. I figure they are my "Is there smoke?" test.
Agree Agree and agree ..
(1) Alonso makes the line-up much better
(2) Arenado would be a good option
(3) This offseason is ripe to be done. Let's get into some baseball!
Perhaps another topic, but if these are your proposed line-ups, I'd offer that it actually looks a bit better if Soto is hitting third rather than second. I like Lindor-Nimmo-Soto-Vientos-McNeil-Alvarez . . .
Dave, you are right, it us not a great lineup. A lot of potential duds in there. What if, Winker wakes and is Winker again? What if McNeil continues swinging a wiffle bal bat? What if Nimmo's health issues drag him down? To many hopes and wishes with the real propensity to crash and burn.
Until Pete signs somewhere, the battle for whats going on will be in the press, and it stinks. The fact is I think the Mets are better with Pete (for a stretch of time) at 1B, and Pete is definitely much with the Mets.
I think its important to say that Pete is in no way over the hill. Decline years sure, but a guy that posts every day for work and consistently bangs 35+ HR does have value, and I believe can provide that kind of result for years to come. It strikes me that the pissing war of "who won" is a patently bankrupt way for the media to cover this.
Pete needs to wake the hell up.
#1 His old agent crew, whom he had forever, organized the exact deal he would take in a heartbeat right now at 7/158. The Mets delivered what would have been a poorly aging contract Pete rejected of his own free will to test free agency and all the randomness inherent to it. As I recently read, Pete picked up Boras shortly after Nimmo, a Boras client, swindled the Mets for his contract that the team will eat (why dont we talk about the Nimmo contract much? Its a stone cold loser for the team.) Did Nimmo recommend Boras after his successful deal? Regardless, Pete and Boras have wildly mismanaged his value.
#2 No one is going to come forward with a deal better than whatever the Mets offered. He continues to make terrible decisions that at every turn are costing him millions, and painting himself as a person no one else sees.
#3 Cohen and Stearns are running a business, but there is blame to lay here too. As refreshing as it was to hear Cohen bat down the boo-birds at Amazin Day, he came dangerously close to a violation of the CBA in disclosing info about contract negotiations. Futhermore, the comments made Pete unnecessarily look bad, and could have spoiled the pot for any other team. Yes, Cohen has a funding limit, but I do not believe the parties are so far apart that there isnt a middle ground where both can celebrate an outcome and avoid the LOL Mets tag thats surely around the corner.
#4 Git R Dun. Im sick of it. Pete: Wake the hell up and make some concessions - here's the deal, when you are in a hole stop digging. Cohen/Stearns: Wake the hell up and make some concessions. He is never going to be offered more than 3 years and theres hardly any deal in the 23-27M AAV that can be so onerous to your vast fortune that it looks like you are flinging turds out of your cage just for spite.
I absolutely agree that Alonso has real value. But that value is in the $20 million dollar range, which isn't chump change. The other day I suggested 1/$23, as an olive branch to the Alonso camp, offering him more than the QO that he declined.
It's too soon to talk about the Nimmo contract in a bad-mouthing way. While he had a drastic dropoff in performance last year, he's still provided excess value in the first two years of his deal. Now, if he falls off even more in 2025, then he's fair game.
My opinion is that Cohen didn't come close to violating the CBA with his comments. We didn't hear a hint of a whisper that the MLBPA was considering taking action. It was just rampant speculation by newspaper columnists.
Nimmo is being oaid through age 37, for a guy with a major foot issue and other injuries. I struggle to see talking about Petes decline in ages 30, 31, and 32 across a 3-yr contract. Thats way off base to me. I think you avg 2-3 bWAR for 4+ years still, with an individual great or poor year sprinkled in.
You want so much to label Nimmo as injury-prone yet he's played 150 games each of the past three seasons.
Nimmo's stats fell off in the second half of last year, in part due to the plantar fasciitis. We have no idea if the p.f. will continue to affect him this year. Maybe it will. Or maybe he'll hit like he did in the first half of 2024 over an entire season.
Regardless of how Nimmo fares, he's already under contract. And the real question is if they should add a big-money deal to Alonso. You think that because Cohen is rich, he should gladly pay XX money over three years. And I think the Mets should be very conservative with the money they send his way, given his past two years and the plethora of non-athletic 1B who've cratered at a similar age.
Off the top of my head there's Chris Davis, Glenn Davis, Adam Dunn, Richie Sexson and Mo Vaughn. And I know you don't place value on human comps. But just because you don't doesn't mean the rest of the world feels that way. There have been zero reports that any team besides the Mets has offered Alonso a contract. Don't you think Boras and his flunkies in the press would have leaked a proposal if they had one?
If he's so incredibly valuable - above and beyond what I think or what Stearns apparently thinks - why hasn't another team signed him? At some point what I think or what you think or anyone else here thinks is irrelevant. The market will decide what he's worth. And the market is awfully quiet right now.
Look you can pull any window out you want for Nimmo career injury status. I could easily say that in the prime of his baseball life he played 69, 55, and 92 games per season. The fact is, Nimmo is an injury risk and we are dealing with injury this very minute. He's averaging about 118 games per season through his career (excluding year 1 and 2020).
Im not proposing that Cohen starts weeping like a baby and give Pete the 7/158 contract he passed on by any means. I am saying that there is a little room to give the guy contract that is market competitive and a bit appreciative for the dynamism he brings to the fan base and respect for being RoY and a 4x AS when he was making peanuts. So I can sleep at night giving him a market deal for 3 years at 23 AAV and add 1M/yr on that for 24M/yr and 72M total. He can opt out at years 1 and 2, or Mets can opt in and increase the AAV to 25 for the remaning 2 years. He should not get Freeman money at 27M/yr. But in the end you are talking about 69 or up to 74M. I just cant see that being any part of a worry for Cohen.
So, let's ignore what Nimmo's done the last three years. And let's also put the games played in the Covid year and act like playing in 92% of the team's games is some awful total. Got it.
But somehow, I'm not going to put a huge value on the number of games Nimmo played in 2019, much like I'm not going to put a huge value on the production of Alonso in 2019, either. What the players have done the past three seasons has a lot more to do with how they'll perform in the future than what happened six years ago. Ancient history.
Billionaires don't stay billionaires by pissing away millions of dollars year after year after year. Cohen doesn't want to pay $90-$110 million annually in Luxury Tax payments and he doesn't want to pay over-inflated dollars for a declining first baseman.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it.
I took out the games played in year 1 and 2020, like I said. Nimmo is injured right now. He is a delay for ST, and hopeful for opening day. It is what it is.
I'll never cry a drop for Cohen and his money, or his apparently big mouth. We are talking about a few millions of dollars, Starbucks money, to possibly get a deal done that makes the Mets better, makes fans happy, brings in money though attendance and merch. But forget that, it was Cohen himself that said he wanted to be the Dodgers East. He blew 80M$ on 2 lousy old fart pitchers who played so little for the team that I would barely say either were Mets. Those 2 contracts alone he payed as dead weight are more than a proposed contract for 3 years of Alonso with 100+ more HR, 250+ RBI, and 6-8 bWAR etc.
Perhaps Alonso should get Freeman money at $27M. Freeman is obviously the better player but is he worth that much more to the Dodgers than Alonso is to the Mets when this team really needs a strong bat to become relevant? In 2024 Freeman hit 10.92% of the Dodgers' RBIs and 10.47% of TBs while Alonso hit 11.97% of the Mets' RBIs and 12.20% of TBs. The Dodgers can replace Freeman's production more easily than the Mets can replace Alonso's.
I like the idea of the one year deal so both sides can have another year to validate themselves. A 1 year/27 million contract should be satisfying for everyone. Alonso gets the biggest salary of his life and Stearns gets the future flexibility that he wants while avoiding accusations that he gave up on the playoffs over a few million dollars.
We've advanced past judging pitchers by Wins. Next step is to stop judging hitters by RBIs. Come join us in the 21st Century. Look at WAR or OPS or wRC+ or WPA.
And if you absolutely must use RBIs - you need to look at it as more than half a stat. A player's RBIs depend on his teammates and how many times he comes to bat with runners on base. Alonso batted last year with 431 runners on base, the fourth-most in MLB. Despite all of the HR, he did not finish with the fourth-most RBIs. His 12.53 RBI% was below average.
It's pretty easy to see why fans over value Alonso. They're still viewing the game thru basic stats that are no longer the way people in front offices view the game.
Because I can't help myself, I'll inject myself into this discussion. I tend to be in Chris's camp with regard to the Pete situation. While I understand that good economics are not bidding against yourself and overpaying for things, but Pete has given the Mets a hell of a lot more value over the last 6 years than he will ever get back from them. I am not a billionaire, but once in a while I will pay for a Sam Adams Holiday Fest when I could go the economical route and get a Bud Lite. I am not broke yet. And yes, Steve 'wasted' a ton of money paying down contracts of players that were on other teams . . Schertzer, Verlander, McCann.
I'd also say that a lot of players have had down years and bounced back to be productive into and through their thirties. Even Adam Dunn hit 75 homers in his age 32 and 33 years together.
I'd say give Pete a chance - I am not advocating a 5 or 7 year deal, but a three year deal for even $24 or $25M does not seem to be too much spend on a guy that has been a backbone of the resurgence of the Mets in this decade.
Mets need one more bat. That's either Alonso or Bregman unless there's a trade out there.
Seems like Toronto is Alonso's only other landing spot as DH for a year and then Vlad Jr.'s replacement in '26. With light demand, I think there's a reasonable chance Alonso returns to the Mets on their terms: 3/70 with no opt-outs. But that might not be until pitchers and catchers report to Port St. Lucie.
One more bat. Well said. Pete being a DH for a year won’t help him maintain the fielding skills he does have. And how much more could Toronto being willing to pay him. I’m with Cohen on Alonso as I am honestly so sick of this waiting game. It’s not fair to us die hard fans. Boras does get his clients top dollar, but don’t any of those players know when to tell their agent to get a life and let’s get this done?
Just tossing my take in here, since there’s clearly a deficit of opinions out there. I do wish that the press could do even more rehashing of old news and baseless speculation. LOL. My view is that they may not be hung up on the money as much as who has the leverage on years 2 and 3. Pete wants to be able to opt out if he has a monster 2025. Can’t blame him. The Mets don’t want to be on the hook for 2026 if his downward trend continues. I don’t think a few million bucks is the issue right now. If I had to guess, Pete signs a one year deal sometime before ST for close to $30M, with no strings attached for 2026 in either direction. For the record, I think Pete created this pickle he’s in for himself when he turned down the 6-7-year deal and signed Boras. I’d like to see him in the 2025 lineup but he’s not owed anything by the Mets anymore than he owes the Mets a hometown discount.