Put Alonso, Soto and Lindor on one team and this was always going to happen
They said
This is the first time in franchise history that the Mets have featured three players with 30+ homers in a season.
The arithmetic
It’s true. We checked all sixty-four seasons.
Juan Soto hit 43 home runs. Pete Alonso hit 38. Francisco Lindor hit 31. No Mets roster had ever put three men over thirty in the same year, and Brandon Nimmo finished on 25, which would have made it four.
So the claim survives. The question is whether it was remarkable, and the answer depends entirely on who you compare them against.
Against a hitter who isn’t them
Start with the version that flatters. Take a league-average hitter, give him the same number of trips to the plate each of those three got, and ask how often he reaches thirty home runs.
In 2025 the league hit a home run in about 3.1% of plate appearances. Soto came up 715 times, Alonso 709, Lindor 732. A league-average bat in those slots expects 22 home runs, not 30.
Run that across the whole roster and three men clearing thirty is a one-in-2,039 season. Historic, on those terms.
But a league-average hitter is not who the Mets sent up there, and everyone involved knew it.
Against themselves
Alonso has hit 264 home runs in 4,316 plate appearances. That’s a rate of .061, roughly double the league. Give a hitter like that 709 plate appearances and thirty home runs isn’t a feat — it’s the floor. His odds of reaching it were 99%.
His 38 is actually one standard deviation below what his own career rate predicts.
Soto’s own rate put him at 84%. Lindor, the least powerful of the three, was a coin flip at 50% — and his 31 landed almost exactly on his expectation of 29.7.
Multiply those three together and the franchise first comes out at 42%.
More likely than not. The Mets assembled three hitters who were each individually likely to hit thirty home runs, and then all three hit thirty home runs.
Now 1987
Darryl Strawberry hit 39 that year and Howard Johnson hit 36. Two, not three, and the press notes are right that nobody had managed a third until last season.
Strawberry was the safe bet. His career rate projected 33 home runs over his 640 plate appearances, so thirty was a 75% proposition. He hit 39 and did it again the following year.
Howard Johnson is the whole story.
Going into 1987 he had hit 40 home runs in his entire career, across 1,330 plate appearances. A rate of .030 — league average, exactly. His 645 plate appearances that season projected 19 home runs.
He hit 36.
On what was knowable in April, his odds of reaching thirty were 1.4%. The pair together came to roughly one in a hundred.
And 2006 sits in between: Carlos Delgado was routine at 75%, while Carlos Beltrán’s 41 home runs came in 3.7 standard deviations above his own career expectation of 23. He never hit 40 again.
What’s actually true
The Mets did something they had never done before. They did it by acquiring three men who were each, individually, likely to do it.
That’s a roster-construction story. It belongs in a piece about the front office, not a piece about a season.
The 1987 version was the genuine article, and it happened because a utility infielder who had never hit more than twelve home runs in a season suddenly hit 36 — and then did it twice more. Nobody put a press release out about the odds of that, because nobody computes the odds of a thing after it stops being surprising.
Three thirty-homer hitters in 2025 is a bigger headline than two in 1987. It is also a smaller departure from what the ball, the lineup slots and the payroll were always going to produce.