MILWAUKEE — At 9:17 p.m. CT, 34 minutes after he’d saved a season and forged a legacy, Pete Alonso stepped into a clubhouse already dripping in alcohol.
“PETEY! PETEY! PETEY!” the chorus shouted as it surrounded him, drenching him in Korbel champagne and Budweiser.
This was Alonso’s night. Late to the party but precisely on time.
“Words can’t explain. Words can’t explain,” he said. “I’m just so excited right now.”
Alonso’s three-run homer off Devin Williams in the top of the ninth lifted the New York Mets to their second incredible win in four days, this one a 4-2 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers in a winner-take-all Game 3 of the Wild Card Series. New York will travel Friday morning to Philadelphia. Its first National League Division Series in nine years starts Saturday against the rival Phillies. The two have never met in the postseason.
“We just saw one of the greatest games in Mets history,” president of baseball operations David Stearns said, for the second time this week.
Stearns knows that history. He knows that though the Mets’ number of postseason wins might be relatively small, their impact can be momentous. This is the franchise that spells “Amazin” without the g, whose fans still wear “Mojo Rising” T-shirts, where for a half-century now you can’t walk into a game without spotting a sign reading “Ya Gotta Believe.”
The 2024 Mets are charting that same kind of path into franchise lore.
Francisco Lindor, Pete Alonso and David Peterson celebrate after an astonishing ninth-inning comeback. (John Fisher / Getty Images)
“I keep saying it, man: We continue to believe,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “We’ve been punched and knocked down, and we continue to find ways to get back up.”
“Blown away,” team owner Steve Cohen said. “How this keeps happening, I’ll never know. But it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Once you do this,” J.D. Martinez said, “regular baseball is boring.”
All season, the Mets have proved their mettle — at 0-5, at 11 under, at ninth-inning deficits with the season in the balance.
Thursday, they copied/pasted Monday’s script and upped the difficulty. Take away the cushion of a second game if they lose. Take away any offensive success earlier in the night; they’d been held to all of two hits entering the final inning. Add in one of the sport’s most dominant closers, in a stadium ready to blow off the roof.
And yet.
“There was no way this season was going to end without something happening in that ninth inning,” Stearns said.
It was New York’s stars who carried it. Francisco Lindor fought from a 1-2 hole to draw a leadoff walk. Brandon Nimmo singled through the right side to make Alonso the go-ahead run. As he stepped to the plate, he’d had five hits in his last 41 at-bats, and none of them for extra bases.
He’d maintained for weeks that his at-bats were still solid. In this series, he’d tripped over his bat and dropped a pop-up. Next play, he kept telling himself, next play. His manager said time and again he was one swing away.
It happened to be the swing of his life.
Williams’ trademark changeup targeted the outer half. Alonso smoked it the other way, unleashing a yell before the ball cleared the right-field fence and caromed off the first row of stadium seats.
His teammates streamed out of the dugout like Little Leaguers to greet him.
“He was ready for the moment,” Lindor said.
Alonso’s home run helped make heroes elsewhere on the roster. Jose Quintana, in perhaps the biggest start of his life, delivered a masterpiece: six scoreless innings to preserve a 0-0 game into the late innings. Edwin Díaz recorded five outs to keep the Mets within reach after Milwaukee had taken the lead with a pair of seventh-inning home runs off José Buttó. And once handed the lead, the Mets turned to starter David Peterson to lock down the first save of his professional career.
“I don’t think there’s a more fitting way for this team to win,” Nimmo said.
Alonso talked about that childhood dream of hitting a ninth-inning home run in the playoffs. Did he understand Thursday night the magnitude of what he’d just achieved?
“Not right now,” he said with a smile, before a pause. “I don’t think I ever will.”
One trembles to ponder what the Mets have in store for their next encore. But the difficulty is about to be amplified again in a Division Series date with the Phillies.
“This ride’s not over yet,” Peterson said.
“It’s going to be intense,” Nimmo said. “This is exactly what you want.”
(Top photo of Pete Alonso: Patrick McDermott / Getty Images)
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