About

The origin

During contract negotiations, Pete Alonso told Mets president David Stearns that when his Hall of Fame case came to be judged, the analysts would still be fiddling with their formulas. Then he bet on himself: he turned down seven years and $158M, played two more seasons, and signed with Baltimore for five years and $155M at a record $31M average annual value for a first baseman.

Counting the two seasons in between, declining that offer earned him roughly $50M more over the same seven years. He was right about the money.

Whether he was right about the decline is the open question, and it is the only question this site asks. The contract covers ages 31 to 35, which are the years the formulas say a power hitter starts to go. So: is the Polar Bear declining, and is the contract paying off? The answer gets revisited in public, on the record, for five years.

The site is affectionate about the player and self-aware about the analytics. It is exactly the thing he was mocking. It does not think he was wrong to mock it.

How it works

Every number on this site comes out of one append-only file. An update adds one dated record; nothing is ever overwritten and nothing is edited by hand. That is deliberate. It means the history accumulates on its own, and it means no claim on the site can quietly go stale while the prose around it stays confident.

The verdict follows a published rule, not a mood. A verdict only changes after the new reading holds for two consecutive snapshots, and only reverts after three. Every verdict ever issued stays on the home page, with its date, so the site's own record can be checked against what actually happened.

The thresholds, the decision rule, the scenario model and the valuation are all on The Formulas, rendered from the same code the site computes with. There is one copy of each number, so what is published and what is applied cannot come apart.

What this is not

Polar Bear Projections is an independent fan analytics project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Pete Alonso, the Baltimore Orioles, the New York Mets, or MLB.

There are no accounts and no comments. The only measurement is a cookieless page counter: it records that a page was viewed and where the visit came from, and it does not set cookies, follow you between sites, or build any profile of you. There is nothing to opt out of because there is nothing about you to collect. Nothing here is for sale. The site uses no team logos, no uniform photography and no MLB marks; the identity is typographic and the charts are its own.

On the nickname: "Polar Bear" is Alonso's, not this site's. The project is unmonetized and non-commercial, and the judgment is that a fan analytics project may use it in that form. If that ever changes, the right-of-publicity question gets a real review before anything is sold. Recorded as a decision on 19 August 2026 so it is on the record as considered rather than overlooked. This is not legal advice.

Nothing here is investment advice, and nothing here is a projection of any player's health.