The most significant and boisterous agent in baseball, Scott Boras, held his annual Winter Meetings press conference yesterday, and was quick to draw various witty connections between star free agent slugger Pete Alonso (nicknamed the Polar Bear by former Mets third baseman Todd Frazier) and his hometown team, the Tampa Bay Rays:
The two-time Home Run Derby winner was indeed born and raised in Tampa and attended Plant High School, where he became a standout baseball player before moving on to play college ball at the University of Florida before being drafted by the Mets in 2016.
Alonso continues to live in Tampa during the offseason, and gives back to the community through the Alonso Foundation, which hosts events like the “Battle for the Bay,” a youth home-run derby that raises money to improve local baseball and softball fields.
But if we are drawing familial connections, it may also be worth mentioning Alonso’s wife is a Cape Cod native, having met Alonso in the summer of 2015, when he played for the Bourne Braves of the Cape Cod Baseball League, casting Boston as a competitor for his signature.
Surely, though, this is all conjecture. It’s impossible to know at this stage if Boras’s connection between Alonso and the perpetually cash-poor Rays — who already have a 1B and DH — is serious. Nevertheless, his signing would represent the exact sort of big splash you might hope from a new ownership group taking over a franchise.
Boras, for his part, has not even spoken to the new ownership group, but has told the Tampa Bay Times that he is looking forward to meeting them in the near future:
“From what I understand, their hope is to invigorate the market, bring a new home to it, bring a new label to how they perform and what they do. Retain their stars, things like that. So that Tampa becomes a home rather than an airport.”
[Tampa Bay Times]
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