To say Pete Alonso was unhappy about the Mets firing hitting coach Chili Davis early in the 2021 season might be an understatement.
Zack Scott, who was the Mets’ acting general manager that season, wrote on X along with an accompanying clip from his podcast that the first baseman “was pissed when I fired hitting coach Chili Davis and came at me like he was ready to throw down.”
“Pete Alonso comes rushing in from the cafeteria,” Scott said in the clip from his “Deconstructing Champions: The Art and Science of Winning” podcast. “He’s pissed and gets in my face — he’s a big guy, much bigger than me — which was fine. I appreciated Pete’s passion.
“This is in an open area, all the players are around kind of looking like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here?’ And I just said, ‘Hey, let’s step aside and have a conversation.’ And we had a good conversation. I felt like by the end of it, even though he disagreed, he understood and appreciated that I was willing to be so open and honest with him, and he kind of calmed down from that initial reaction.”
Alonso, who said at the time he cried at his locker after the May 3 firings of Davis and assistant hitting coach Tom Slater, found out about the changes on Twitter, and Scott said it was “his fault” he didn’t get the message to the players before the news became public.
Scott said Alonso was still “pretty hot” during the team meeting the day after the firings.
“I thought like he’d have a night to sleep on it and he would not be as fired up, but he was still pretty pissed off,” Scott said. “He pulled up a seat right in front of me while I addressed the room and he asked me a lot of questions. Some other guys asked questions and it was fine.
“I had some veteran players actually apologize for Pete, which I said, ‘You don’t need to apologize for him. I appreciate the passion that he’s showing. I appreciate that he cares, he cares about his teammate.’ “
The Mets had just lost to the Cardinals to drop them to 12-12 and Francisco Lindor was struggling badly at the plate.
Things didn’t go much better under replacement hitting coach Hugh Quattlebaum and assistant Kevin Howard, as the Mets scored the fourth-fewest runs in MLB with 636 and they missed the playoffs at 77-85.
After that season, Davis gave his candid thoughts on Scott and the Mets in a November 2021 interview with The Post’s Mike Puma.
“That organization needs a big turnaround, they need to clean house,” Davis said at the time. “Some of the people that have been there so long during those dismal years, they need to bring some fresh faces and baseball people in there. To be honest, I don’t think Zack Scott was a baseball person. He was the head of analytics in Boston. He was an analytical guy. That’s where he belonged, in analytics.”
The Mets parted ways with Scott following the 2021 season after an Aug. 31 DWI arrest. In January 2022, he was acquitted of all criminal charges stemming from the arrest.
