The home run exploits of the 2023 Mets

This is the 62nd season of Mets baseball. If you were a fan for the first 40 years, you saw two World Series wins. You also saw a lot of rotten baseball and some pretty inept teams when it came to hitting home runs. Many people were worried about the HR capabilities of the 2023 Mets when the season began. But thru 87 games, the Mets have hit 112 HR, which is more homers than the full-season totals of 24 teams in club history.

The Mets are averaging just under 1.3 HR per game. If they keep this pace up for the entire year, they’ll finish 2023 with 209 HR, which would be the fourth-best mark in franchise history and 38 more than they hit last season. But the Mets have been showing increased power since mid-May. After going without a home run in five straight games, the Mets homered in 15 straight games and have gone deep in 40 of their last 45 contests.

In their last 45 games, the Mets have hit 71 homers, which is a shade beneath 1.6 HR per game. If they maintain that pace over their final 75 games, they’ll finish with 230 home runs, which would be the second-best mark in franchise history. The club record is 242 HR, set by the 2019 team. Pete Alonso led the way with 53 HR that season, while Michael Conforto had 33. Three other players had homer totals in the 20s while four others reached double-digits.

It will be a tough ask for this year’s team to match the 2019 squad’s mark of nine hitters with at least 10 homers. Right now, there are four players with double-digit bombs, while Tommy Pham is knocking on the door with nine. Mark Canha is next with six home runs but for some reason has seen his playing time cut considerably despite being one of the team’s most effective hitters the last five weeks. They have three more hitters each with five homers, so it’s not impossible for them to end the year with nine players to reach that 10-HR mark. But you wouldn’t want to wager on it.

Rather, the hope should be that the Mets’ top three home run hitters will beat the mark of 109 set by the top three of the 2019 squad. If you were a fan of the pre-Dave Kingman Mets, the idea that three guys could combine for 109 or more homers is borderline insane. For example, the 1972 Mets finished 10 games above .500 and their top three home run hitters combined for 39 HR, led by John Milner with 17.

Just like in 2019, Alonso leads the team in homers, this time with 26. That’s a great number, third overall in the majors and second in the National League. Yet while he homered in Thursday’s game, Alonso has not hit them out at the pace he was previously since being activated from the IL. Prior to being sidelined when he was hit on the wrist, Alonso had 22 HR in 61 games. Since his return, he has 4 HR in 17 games. Hand/wrist injuries are known for sapping power. And Alonso made it back after missing just 10 days. The initial prognosis was that he might be sidelined for three weeks.

If everything broke right for Alonso this year, he had a chance to hit 60 homers. That’s most likely off the table after the wrist injury. Still, it wouldn’t be a surprise if he hit 45 HR this year, which would be the second-most homers of his career. It would also be a pretty nice start to having three guys with triple-digit homers.

Francisco Lindor is next on the club this year with 18 HR currently. So much has been made of the fact that Lindor has more XBH (40) than singles (36) this season. That’s not great for his AVG but it’s not a bad thing if you want to maximize homers hit. Lindor hit 26 HR last year and his career high is the 38 he hit in 2018, the middle year in a span where he topped 30 home runs in three straight seasons. Another 30-homer season is on the table for Lindor. If he continues to hit them out at his current rate, he’ll finish the year with 34.

This leaves us in the 80-homer neighborhood for the top two sluggers, which brings us to the final leg of the top-three power guys.

Francisco Alvarez has massive power, as his 467-foot homer Tuesday night showed. He’s also a 21-year-old rookie playing the most demanding position on the diamond. While it wouldn’t be a surprise if Buck Showalter played both Alonso and Lindor in all 75 of the Mets’ remaining games, Alvarez will get multiple days off the remainder of the season. So, it’s difficult to figure out how many homers he might hit the rest of the way.

Further complicating things is that in true Kingman fashion, Alvarez seems to hit his homers in bunches. He has 16 HR in 63 games this season. Yet he smacked 7 HR in 15 G from 5/9-5/28, as well as 4 HR in 4 G in the second week of June and now four homers in his last five games. On the flip side, he went 15 games without a homer between the second and third stretches mentioned above.

How is Alvarez going to hold up in his first full MLB season? If the Mets are able to fight their way back into the playoff picture, will that increase the pressure on Alvarez? Can he avoid prolonged stretches without a homer in the second half of the season? Those are all questions that surround Alvarez that simply aren’t there for either Alonso or Lindor.

But just because he hasn’t done it yet doesn’t mean that he can’t.

At the bare minimum, my hope is that the 2023 Mets eclipse the mark of 171 homers that last year’s squad hit. That seems like a fairly safe bet. But my rooting interest is for them to amass 200 home runs, a plateau reached just four times in club history, all since 2006. Additionally, my hope is that the 2023 Mets become the first team in franchise history with three players to hit at least 30 home runs in a season.

There have been only 36 seasons in franchise history where a Mets batter hit 30 homers. Eight times they’ve had two players do it in the same year. It seems like it would quite the accomplishment to have three guys do it in a season where many fans were worried if the club had enough power in the lineup. The early arrival in the majors of Alvarez makes this a legitimate possibility.

And perhaps if they reach 200 HR, with three 30-homer guys, they can reach the playoffs, too.