Just because Peter Alonso comes out hot for the New York Mets doesn’t mean he stays hot or even stays around the whole season. The whole Mets team started hot last season -- 11-1, talk of baseball in April -- and you know how they faded. It could happen to the kid out of Tampa, Fla. In the Mets’ home opener on Thursday afternoon, Stephen Strasburg and the guys who followed him managed to hang an o-fer on Alonso, who’d hit the ball hard against them last week and then against the Marlins. It dropped Alonso’s average to .346 over his first seven games in the big leagues.

Alonso has already gotten his first hit. And his first big hits. He has hit the ball hard. So he makes himself another young guy to watch with the Mets, along with Michael Conforto and Amed Rosario. This is how you build something to last, and how to make your side of New York City matter in baseball.

Alonso, the club's No. 1 prospect, was no sure thing to make the team when he showed up at Spring Training. Even after he came out hot in Port St. Lucie, there was the notion that Alonso might start the season with Triple-A Syracuse as a way of not starting the clock on his big league career. But then he wouldn’t stop hitting. He wasn’t going to Syracuse. He was going to Washington D.C. to start the season against the Nats.

This is the way Brodie Van Wagenen, the new Mets general manager, describes what happened with Alonso in the spring:

“He won the job during Spring Training. But the plan was to give him every opportunity to win the job.”

Van Wagenen then adds this thought:

“And he seized that job from jump street.”

Alonso hit one out of JetBlue Park one day in Fort Myers, way out, and Red Sox manager Alex Cora called the kid the best hitter in Florida at that point in the spring. Alonso is a right-handed hitter with pop in his bat, and it has been a long time since the Mets developed a right-handed hitter with pop in his bat. Maybe the last kind to come out of the farm system with that kind of pop was David Wright, who was on his way to being called the greatest Mets hitter of them all until injury robbed him of all the promise he showed in his 20s.

Wright should have made it to the World Series when he was at his best, back in 2006, before the National League Championship Series ended at Shea Stadium with the bat on Carlos Beltran’s shoulder in the bottom of the 9th of Game 7, taking a called third strike from Adam Wainwright. When Wright finally did make it to the World Series, in 2015 against the Royals, he was a shell of what he once had been. He still managed to play all five games, get five hits and hit a World Series home run. It is always worth remembering with Wright that he is the same age, 36, as the new Mets second baseman, Robinson Cano.

A lot has happened to the Mets since that World Series, not very much of it good. They gave their fans a rousing finish to the 2016 season, managing to come from the outside and get an NL Wild Card spot. Then it was Noah Syndegaard going toe-to-toe with the great Madison Bumgarner, before Conor Gillaspie hit a three-run homer off Jeurys Familia. Last season, of course, was an 11-1 start followed by an amazin’ slide that took the Mets all the way to last place before they even got to July.

Now the Mets get off to a decent start. Again. They take two of three from the Nationals on the road. They sweep the Marlins in Miami. Alonso got two more hits in the last game of that series. Even after going 0-for-4 on Thursday, his OPS is 1.008. He has four doubles and a homer and has knocked in seven runs already. It is only a week, you bet. Only the first week of April. Alonso and the Mets would have signed up for a first week exactly like it when Spring Training began.

Who knows how the Mets will do in the NL East, what has become the kind of meat grinder the AL East has been for a long time? Who knows what the Phillies are capable of now that they have Bryce Harper in the middle of their batting order and the Nationals do not? And it is always worth remembering that it was the Braves, who have a world of young talent of their own, who won the division last season.

But the Mets are an interesting team again, run now by Van Wagenen, a former CAA agent who wasn’t afraid to show up in the big city proclaiming that he thought he had the best team in the division. He has added Cano. He has added Edwin Diaz, a closer who saved 57 games for the Mariners a year ago. He has added another veteran, Wilson Ramos, to catch. The Mets are waiting for good health from Jed Lowrie, who quietly knocked in 99 runs for the A’s last season.

But across the first week of the season, the player to watch for the Mets has been Alonso, the kid at first base, out of Jesuit High in Tampa. Right-handed kid with pop, and promise. Been awhile for the Mets.