Projecting When Pete Alonso Will Tie and Pass Darryl for the Franchise HR Record in 2025.
I was really happy to see Alonso re-up with the Mets for 2025, primarily because he improves their offense, but also because it will be exciting as a fan to watch him hopefully claim the franchise HR record. With 226 homers, Pete is 26 shy of tying Darryl Strawberry's franchise record 252 dingers. We can expect that Pete will set the record at some point in 2025, given that he has never hit less than 34 in a full season. In an effort to reasonably project this milestone's date in 2025, I took a look at Pete's game logs from each full season in his career to see when he hit homers #26 and #27. Here is my chart for reference (figures from Baseball Ref's game logs):
Looking at the above, a few things stand out. First, 2019 (53 homers) and 2023 (46 homers) were really awesome years for Pete, such that he was able to hit HR #26 on June 22 of his 2019 season and July 6 of his 2023 season. The other three seasons (2021, 2022, 2024) took significantly more time to reach 26 homers–ie, from July 27, 2022 to as late in the season as 8/17/2021.
When Pete Could Tie the Record in 2025:
Averaging the dates from each season that Pete hit his 26th homer suggests that Pete would hit his 26th homerun around July 24. Removing his 2019 season from the averages suggests that he will hit HR #26 around August 2.
When Pete Could Set the Record in 2025:
Aside from the 2023 season (where it took 13 games) Pete has only needed 1-4 games in each other full season in his career to hit HR #27, so, we can again project based on these assumptions that Pete would pass Darryl anywhere around July 25-29 (if we include 2019 in the sample) to August 3-7 (if we only include his 2021-2024 seasons in the analysis).
That said, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and any number of things could make this projection look wildly silly in six months, but who knows.