Pete Alonso finally gets his Mets champagne celebration: More than I imagined

ATLANTA — A drenched Pete Alonso glanced around a happy and champagne-soaked clubhouse, a sight that had proven elusive for his first five years with the Mets.It was worth the wait.“This is way more than I imagined,” Alonso said after the Mets took the first game of a doubleheader with the Braves at Truist Park, which ensured a wild-card berth.“This is unbelievable.”Eight-hundred forty-six major league games later, the Mets slugger finally got a chance to celebrate a season that will be extended.

Alonso had reached the postseason once, in 2022, when the Mets opted against spraying bottles in one another’s faces: They had been caught by the Braves and learned on the final regular-season day that they would not win the NL East.The disappointment meant no party for a wild-card team that was knocked out in the wild-card round by the Padres.That stuck with Alonso, who called upon his bubbly drought in a team meeting two weeks ago.

On Sept.16, he tried to inspire and convey how much a bash like this would mean, a pending free agent desperate to crack into the postseason and desperate for toasts to a season that was worth celebrating.The meeting — or maybe it was the team-wide resilience for a club that had buried itself by early June and managed to escape — worked.After splitting the doubleheader on Monday, Alonso was in the middle of the festivities.“Oh, my God,” Alonso said, appropriate for the 2024 Mets.

“Wow.Just wow.

This is surreal.Vibes are immaculate.

This is super well-deserved because we’ve come such a long way this year.”Such was the theme, plenty of Mets calling upon a record that was 24-35 on June 2.The 89-win club found a rotation that began rolling, swapped some pieces, added Jose Iglesias and called a late-May meeting that many cite as the turning point.

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