The calendar has turned to February and that means Major League Baseball will be back before the month is out. New York Mets position players are required to report to spring training camp in Port St. Lucie, Florida, on Feb. 17. The Mets play their first spring training game exactly one week later at Clover Park, against the St. Louis Cardinals.

And the Mets four-time All-Star, former rookie of the year and home-run record setter Pete Alonso is still unsigned.

Alonso’s 53 home runs in 2019 set an MLB record for a rookie, and his career total of 226 is the third-most by any hitter over their first six big league seasons. According to MLB Network baseball insider journalist Joel Sherman, that may be exactly the problem. The Mets, Sherman believes, are no longer satisfied with a player who produces home runs but lacks in other areas of the game.

“There has to be age and/or positional value, or defense and/or baserunning, added to it to get the big money over a long-term contract,” Sherman said Friday, speaking on “The Michael Kay Show.” “Pete Alonso simply does not fit in this bucket. And it’s kind of like reading from an old book — where teams used to pay for homers. …There was a time when the game would have closed its eyes and paid for homers. It doesn’t do that anymore.”

But another longtime MLB Network insider, Jon Heyman — who, like Sherman, is also a baseball writer for the New York Post — predicted in a Thursday column that the Mets could still stage a “dramatic comeback” in talks with Alonso, even though the team’s billionaire owner Steve Cohen has called the negotiations “exhausting” and claimed that contract demands made by Alonso and agent Scott Boras are “highly asymmetric against us.”

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Heyman noted the Mets were not initially favored to sign this offseason’s most-prized free agent, Juan Soto. In three rounds of bidding for Soto, Heyman wrote, the Mets “nearly fell out” in Round One, and were only in “the middle” by Round Two. And yet, when the negotiations were over, Cohen and the Mets got their man.

A similar comeback is possible in the Alonso talks, Heyman predicted.

But Sherman, in his own column Saturday, sounded a more pessimistic tune, saying the Mets have their own internal projections showing that a lineup without Alonso, but with Soto included, will be at least as productive as the 2024 lineup that got New York into the postseason.

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