Mets whiff on Pete Alonso and slide into a Padres-style offseason crisis

If you’re a San Diego Padres fan doom-scrolling through Winter Meetings chaos, the Mets just handed you a weird kind of comfort blanket.

New York watched Pete Alonso walk out the door to the Baltimore Orioles on a five-year, $155 million deal, ending a seven-year run that was basically their entire middle-of-the-order identity. That’s brutal on its own. Then you remember they also let Edwin Díaz get poached by the Dodgers, because of course the Dodgers were lurking around the “elite closer” aisle with a platinum card.

Mets lose Pete Alonso to the Orioles and tumble into a very Padres-style crisis

The Mets are trying to patch up the bullpen with Devin Williams, but Williams is a long shot to return to his previous form. The Mets can't simply substitute Díaz and Alonso for other players and think the momentum and wins will remain intact. In one short week, they have lost an MVP-caliber hitter and their shutdown closer.

Sound familiar? Meanwhile in San Diego, the Padres are staring down their own version of the same movie. Dylan Cease is already gone to Toronto. Michael King looks like the next starter out the door. That’s two big rotation losses for a team that was already walking the payroll tightrope and trying to convince everyone this was “recalibration,” not regression.

Here’s where it gets interesting for Padres fans: the Mets stumbling might actually help.

If New York is taking a clear step back in the NL playoff hierarchy, that’s one less heavyweight you have to leapfrog in the Wild Card mess. The Dodgers are still the final boss, the Braves still exist, and the Central will cough up at least one annoying upstart, but the Mets punting on their Alonso era shifts the math a bit.

None of that matters if the Padres don’t handle their own business — namely, patching the rotation and not treating “hope” as a roster-building strategy. But as painful as this winter has felt in San Diego, at least Padres fans can say this much:

They’re not the only big-market team watching their window fog up in real time.