Why hasn’t anyone signed Pete Alonso?
Last week, Kansas City Royals first baseman Vinnie Pasquantino appeared on The Chris Rose Rotation podcast to discuss a variety of things from “Vinnie’s current hair game” to “Excitement for the 2025 season” and beyond. But it was a question from Rose and Vinnie’s response about the free agency of former New York Met, Pete Alonso, that made the rounds on social media.
By traditional standards, Alonso, who just turned 30 in December, would be a highly coveted free agent. Of the 151 players who have acumulated 2,000 or more plate appearances since 2019, Alonso ranks 19th with a 131 wRC+. He’s an incredibly consistent hitter who can be counted on to walk at a 10% clip and hit between 35 and 50 home runs a year. Yet he remains unsigned as January comes to a close, with Mets owner Steve Cohen describing the Alonso free agent discussion as “exhausting.”
On the podcast, Vinnie lamented the state of first baseman in the game of baseball and that stats have unfairly deemed first basemen, like himself, as lacking value.
That’s where we’re at in baseball today. If you play first base, you basically have to put up an .850 OPS to get paid nowadays. Which is fine, you need to perform, but teams use WAR and if you play first it is very difficult to get that WAR number up because it’s so dragged down by the position you play. Again, fine, these guys have determined that these guys who handle the ball almost more than anybody in terms of catching the baseball are the least valuable people out there—just throw the biggest guy you have and play them at first. And now guys are seeing the consequences of that.
What Vinnie is referring to is how the Wins Above Replacement stat adjusts for defensive position in its defensive value calculation. To take into consideration the added difficulty of playing catcher or shortstop versus playing right field or third base, for instance, there is a baseline adjustment that is applied to every defensive inning. The positional adjustment listed for first baseman and designated hitters is brutal, at -12.5 runs and -17.5 runs, respectively, per 162 games. This makes it very difficult to accrue objective value, as first basemen and designated hitters are starting from way behind.
And you know what—Vinnie is right! The baseline positional adjustments were determined nearly 20 years ago, and I keep coming back to Jeff Zimmerman’s piece about re-examining the defensive spectrum from 2015. Zimmerman uses more modern data and argues that the defensive spectrum should be much, much flatter; namely, that the adjustment for first basemen and designated hitters should be just -9.5 runs.
There was a time in which that may not have mattered that much, since every team nowadays has their own proprietary statistical cocktail that incorporates all sorts of data. But WAR matters a lot now that the new Collective Bargaining Agreement literally doles out millions of dollars based in large part by WAR in the form of pre-arbitration bonuses. In other words, WAR is fundamentally looped into the baseball salary structure, and it materially matters to first basemen if it’s shortchanging them.
Vinnie didn’t stop there, though. He also has a point about free agency in general:
I don’t know, it’s just tough. Pete [Alonso] has been the face of the Mets for the last few years, and that should mean something in my opinion. Obviously I’m not in the room, but it does not seem like they value the things that he brings to the table other than the numbers and that’s what teams are doing nowadays. I personally think it hurts teams. I get that the Dodgers have the most money of any team, but they are investing in players and players that mean something off the field and they’re winning.
This dovetails with a broader issue about free agent spending, which is that teams just aren’t using it as a tool to get better the way they arguably should. Unfortunately, baseball teams are in such a pursuit of efficiency that most will choose to eschew free agents if they can even get a portion of the player’s value from a pre-arb player. If first baseman A makes $800,000, first basemen B at $8,000,000 ought to be 10 times as good in order to sign—or so a lot of teams act.
Vinnie is always good for some candid comments, and that’s a big reason why Royals fans love him. Hopefully, we’ll be in a situation in a few years where other first basemen are talking about Vinnie getting the big bucks.