Polar Bear Pete Alonso
The Mets' Super Slugger is back.
Important Dates:
⚾️ February 12th - Pitchers & Catchers
🏟️ March 27th - Opening Day
💙 April 4th - Mets Home Opener
💰 July 1st - Bobby Bonilla Day
We’ve heard enough about the contract negotiations, Pete’s declining numbers, and the MLB’s wavering views on first basemen as a premium position. Forget all of that.
My Dude. Pete Alonso. The Polar Bear. Is Back.
At a time when the Mets were in search of the next face of the franchise, Pete Alonso burst onto the scene with a ridiculous Rookie of the Year campaign. Our guy hit 53 home runs (breaking Aaron Judge’s record) and also won the home run derby. Homegrown power like that is hard to find.
In 2025, Alonso has a damn good chance to break Daryl Strawberry’s record for Career Mets Home Runs. He only needs 26 dingers to do it. I say only because, excluding the 2020 Covid-19 shortened season, the Polar Bear has never hit fewer than 34 home runs in a season. Oh, and none of those line-ups included Juan Soto. This record should have been broken by David Wright, but I’m excited to see it chased down by Pete Alonso.
In honor of Pete Alonso’s superhero-like ability to hit home runs, I’d like to share the dorkiest item in my Mets collection.
I’m a big comic book fan and the Mets have some pretty significant ties to Marvel. Spider-Man is a Mets Fan. He even got married at Shea Stadium in 1987, which was a live action tie-in to the comic event. Steve Rogers aka Captain America was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, but awoke from his decades long freeze to find that they moved to California. Upon his thaw he became a Mets fan, citing their underdog status as a reason why. An abandoned Citi Field was featured in a flyover scene in Avengers: Endgame, while in Spider-Man: No Way Home, MJ quips, “I think the Mets are going to go all the way this year.”
In 2021, two of the stadium giveaways at Citi Field were Marvel Superhero-related. One of these giveaways was a one-shot comic featuring Pete Alonso as the frozen bat wielding Polar Bear Pete Alonso. The other giveaway was a bobblehead of Pete in his Marvel superhero spandex. Although this is the Polar Bear’s official Marvel origin story, it isn’t his first comic book appearance. Earlier in the year, Pete (and many other celebs) made a cameo in the X-Men’s Hellfire Gala storyline.
I immediately grabbed tickets to the game, which ended up being a single-admission doubleheader, hoping to snag one of these for my collection.
I did the dorky comic book thing and brought bags and boards into the stadium to make sure my Polar Bear Pete Alonso comic book stayed minty fresh. Well…to be perfectly honest, my pregnant wife stashed them in her bag and carried them into the stadium for me (thank you for putting up with me, Kel).
About a year later, I doubled down on doing the dorky comic book thing. I took the issue into my local spot, Heroes Comics and Cards in Norwalk, CT, and for $35, I sent it off to CGC to be slabbed and graded.
I wasn’t expecting much in terms of a grade, considering the comics were likely handled with less care than they would be in a shop. A 9.4 was certainly better than I was expecting. Typically a 9.8 grade from CGC is the top mark, with 9.9s and 10s being extremely rare. Of the Polar Bear Pete Alonso comics submitted for grading (a population that I’m sure was very low), mine was the only one graded at a 9.4 and there were only 3 issues graded higher than that, which makes this a “rare” item in terms of its quality. The grade matters less to me than the display value. This slabbed book looks great on my shelf next to my Polar Bear Pete Alonso bobblehead.
Polar Bear Pete Alonso #1 isn’t going to make the list of the Top 100 Marvel Comics of All Time List, but it does feature Pete falling asleep in the clubhouse and becoming an armor-clad hero. He uses his frozen baseball bat and joins actual polar bears in their fight against some ice monsters. The story isn’t much, but it’s fun, and it features cameos from JD Davis, Michael Conforto, and Amed Rosario.
The opening panels of the comic book feature Pete hitting a walk-off home run mirroring real life. On August 12,2021, the date of the comic book giveaway, Pete Alonso hit a walk-off home run to defeat the Nationals in game 2 of the doubleheader. To borrow an adjective from the X-Men, this series of events was uncanny.
Now that he’s signed, Pete is rejoining the top of a marvelous Mets line-up. I’m hopeful he will continue to maul baseballs as the Polar Bear this season.
