Culture

How Netflix Took on the Magic of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’

Published

2 months ago

December 9, 2024

Press Room

How Netflix Took on the Magic of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’

By Annie Correal. Photography by Federico Rios.

Annie Correal and Federico Rios traveled to Macondo, a town built by Netflix, in Colombia.

Dec. 9, 2024

The town of Macondo never existed. It was never supposed to. And yet, here it is.

The idyllic town in Colombia was the imaginary setting for “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the 1967 novel that helped Gabriel García Márquez win the Nobel Prize and that, over the years, led to many offers from Hollywood to create an adaptation.

The author always refused, insisting that his novel, in which the real and fantastical converge, could never be rendered onscreen. His Macondo, he said, could never be built.

But now, in a rambling field outside the city of Ibagué, stands Macondo. Built by Netflix from the ground up for the first-ever screen adaptation of the novel, the town has real birds nesting in its trees and dogs wandering its narrow streets.

García Márquez did not want Hollywood to make a movie from his book, his son Rodrigo García said, because he could not picture English-speaking actors playing the Buendías, the family at the center of the novel. Nor could he see the epic story being squeezed into two hours — or three, or four, for that matter.

And then there was the issue of magical realism, which the author used to conjure his experience of Latin America’s capricious, stranger-than-fiction reality.

In the novel, which opens in the 19th century, the people of Macondo marvel at things already considered ordinary elsewhere: a daguerreotype machine, magnets, ice. But no one questions the presence of a ghost — or whether a baby can be born with the tail of a pig or flowers fall like rain from the sky.

Flowers raining down on Úrsula, the matriarch of the Buendía family.

Pablo Arellano/Netflix

Onscreen, magical realism has proved notoriously hard to replicate: The visual effects used to create such images in the past tipped at times into fantasy or horror, or just looked silly. The 2007 film adaptation of “Love in the Time of Cholera,” the author’s other best-known book, was a box-office flop.

But in the decade since García Márquez died, much has changed and, in a turn he could not have imagined, Netflix has been able to overcome his old objections.

For one, the streaming giant could make a big-budget adaptation of the novel in Spanish, having proved the global appeal of Latin American content with hits like “Narcos” and “Roma.”

Netflix could also make a series, not a film, giving the plot more room to stretch out. Finally, it could film it in the author’s native Colombia, with mostly Colombian actors, said Francisco Ramos, the company’s vice president of content for Latin America. Netflix could make “Cien Años de Soledad,” not “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

The author’s family said yes, and the first season, made up of eight hourlong episodes, airs on Dec. 11. The second is in progress.

García, the author’s son, said the family had agreed in part because they felt a series could produce “the sensation of having experienced 100 years of life,” which is a hallmark of the book, he said.

“That, to me, is what’s important,” he said. “It’s the total experience of immersing yourself.”

And so now, Macondo — and a studious replica of the Buendía home, sheltered beneath a hangar — have become reality.

They are so real, so immersive, in fact, that sometimes the actors aren’t sure where the fiction begins or ends.

On a recent afternoon, as the actor who plays an older Úrsula, the Buendía matriarch, prepared to shoot a scene in the kitchen, she held out an egg before cracking it on a bowl and laughed.

“Is it real, or is it fake?” asked the actor, Marleyda Soto.

The actress playing Úrsula, Marleyda Soto, and Laura Mora, the co-director of the series.

A total commitment to recreating reality, or the novel’s version of reality, would guide their work, the creators decided. With that, would they — finally — get magical realism right?

Inside Macondo

In Colombia, where García Márquez appears on the currency, many people can recite his book’s opening lines: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

In the series, the scene lets viewers see how what might appear ordinary elsewhere is often experienced as magical in Macondo, a town isolated by a dense jungle swamp near the Caribbean coast.

When ice comes to the town for the first time, it is not just a novelty, a sign of modernity, but an otherworldly spectacle. Mirroring the author’s elaborate description of the moment, and hewing closely to the text, the filmmakers create a theatrical scene in which light and shadow evoke an almost religious experience.

Seeing Ice

When it was opened by the giant, the chest gave off a glacial exhalation. Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars. Disconcerted, knowing that the children were waiting for an immediate explanation, José Arcadio Buendía ventured a murmur:

“It’s the largest diamond in the world.”

“No,” the gypsy countered. “It’s ice.”

1970 translation by Gregory Rabassa

The ice also signals the arrival of the first outsiders to Macondo. They are a troupe of gypsies who bring the esoteric knowledge — and basic scientific instruments — that charm José Arcadio, the Quixote-like family patriarch.

He eventually sets to work on alchemy, melting down his wife’s gold coins and leaving his family to fend for itself. While his head is buried in a book, one of his sons runs off with the gypsies. Later, his daughter nearly floats off in her bassinet. He casually pulls her down, more annoyed by the distraction than amazed.

Like other scenes where the impossible occurs, the moment is presented in the series without drama or fanfare, much as it is in the novel by the author.

The Floating Basket

One day Amaranta’s basket began to move by itself and made a complete turn about the room, to the consternation of Aureliano, who hurried to stop it. But his father did not get upset. He put the basket in its place and tied it to the leg of a table…

1970 translation by Gregory Rabassa

That approach was part of “visually capturing a special book,” said Alex García López, one of the first season’s two directors. “This is the culture of the Caribbean,” he said, where Catholic mysticism mingles with Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean beliefs about life and death, the body and the soul.

Portraying reality as it is experienced by the characters became the guiding vision of the project, said García López. What is familiar, what is theirs, is taken for granted; the new enchants and ultimately destroys.

That is strong social commentary. It is also playful, said García López, who is from Argentina. “It’s typical of Latin America,” he said, “to think that everything that comes from abroad is better than what we have at home.”

The next figures to bring the outside world to Macondo are a magistrate from the capital and a priest, the personification of politics and organized religion.

Against the wishes of the Buendías, they transform the town, painting houses in the blue of their political party and erecting a church. Like the gypsies, they also claim one of the family’s sons, who will head to war.

Most of the first season is devoted to telling this story.

“Ninety percent of the book, and the series, deals with Colombian history and the domestic passions and traumas of this family,” said José Rivera, the screenwriter and playwright who produced the first draft of the screenplay.

“When the magic does happen, it’s startling,” he said. “It’s gorgeous, because it falls in the middle of very everyday realism.”

A scene where Úrsula learns of the death of one of her sons is an example of magic taking place within ordinary daily life. A trickle of his blood travels through the town to reach her.

The Trickle of Blood

A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.

1970 translation by Gregory Rabassa

Úrsula is shocked not by the journey the blood has taken, but by the ominous message she sees in it. It is “her sixth sense” made visible, said García López, who directed the scene.

Flesh and Blood

To keep the production grounded in the characters’ reality, the filmmakers shot the scenes involving magical realism in front of the camera, avoiding visual effects whenever possible, said Laura Mora, who is co-directing the series.

“That had to do with a formal decision on our part,” Mora said. “‘Everything has to feel very homemade, very analog, very, very on-camera.’”

So, for example, the ghost that haunts the Buendías was not a translucent apparition made in postproduction, the directors said. He was a flesh-and-blood actor — with lots of blood.

The ghost appears repeatedly trying to staunch a bleeding wound.

Mauro González/Netflix

Likewise, the scene in which the town’s priest levitates after drinking hot chocolate was not filmed in a studio against a screen. The actor was hauled up right on the set, using ropes and harnesses.

The harness and ropes lifting the priest were removed in postproduction.

Netflix

And in the memorable scene when it rains flowers, thousands of real (and plastic) flowers truly did fall from above while the cameras were rolling.

Real flowers were supplemented with flowers made using visual effects.

Netflix

Mora said the hope was that if the magical scenes looked just like the rest of the drama, they would be more convincing.

“For the actors, that was delightful, because everything was happening on the set,” Mora said. No one had to be told to imagine things that were not there, she said. “That was really beautiful.”

A Homage to Colombia

The town of Macondo embodies the commitment Netflix made to the author’s family when it got the rights to the book in 2018.

No series on this scale had been made in Colombia before. In building the town, an effort that took hundreds of workers more than a year, Netflix gave reality to a bygone world, recreating the Colombia that García Márquez had created, down to the details.

On a recent, sweltering afternoon, Bárbara Enríquez walked through Macondo, a set she helped create as one of the two production designers on the series. She pointed to a towering rubber tree, which was all that had stood in the field before.

The location was chosen in part because of this tree.

Now it was the center of a town filled with buildings modeled on architectural styles from the 19th century, she said: vernacular, Colonial, Republican. There was the book’s bordello and bar, Catarino’s, its school, hotel and church. Dozens of species of plants were shipped in by the landscape designer to recreate the flora of the Caribbean coast.

Enríquez, who designed the set for the 2018 film “Roma,” stepped into the town’s general store.

Her team scoured the country for the antique furniture on the set. She pointed to a woven basket: They commissioned Colombian craftspeople to weave them, along with hats, hammocks and the distinctive shoulder bags known as mochilas.

Hats used in the series, and the general store.

To recreate Macondo, Netflix also relied on museums, documents, researchers and historians. The costume designer used drawings made by a 19th-century traveler and a government commission to create a wardrobe of thousands of garments.

“In the end,” said Enríquez, “‘One Hundred Years’ is a homage to Colombia.”

The creative crew had to sit down for Colombian history lessons, learning about the Thousand Days’ War, the brutal civil conflict that plays a pivotal role in the first season.

The actors had to learn to speak in the regional Costeño accent, and also to write longhand, in ink, to sew and embroider. They took to calling it “The School of One Hundred Years.”

Costumes were aged on the set.

In the process, everyone on set learned that many scenes from the book that appear fantastical were part of García Márquez’s life.

In his writings, the author revealed it was his sister who, like a little girl adopted by the Buendías, ate dirt. And there really was a priest in the region who was said to levitate when he drank wine from the chalice. (García Márquez said he swapped the wine for hot chocolate because he found that more believable.)

“You realize, OK, what he’s doing here is he is narrating the stories of the world he was born into,” Mora, the director, said. “Magical realism is a name that the academics have applied.”

The cast, most of whom are Colombian like Mora, came to see the series that way, too — as a way of bringing to life not only a fiction born from one man’s imagination, but also their country’s rich, if painful, history, and its inimitable culture.

Mora, the director, used this notebook to plan shoots.

Because of the care brought to that effort, the details accumulate to make Macondo seem real, said Enríquez, the production designer. “They may not all be seen, but they can be felt.”

The first season recreates the 19th century; the second will follow Macondo into the 20th. Enríquez said she hoped the deeply researched production would work like a time machine, making Colombians say, “That’s right, it was just like that.”

In the end, “you enter into the fiction,” she said. “Everyone enters the world of the fiction, and you embrace it.”

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Culture

How Unrivaled became the WNBA free agency hub of all chatter, gossip and deal-making

Published

2 hours ago

January 27, 2025

Press Room

How Unrivaled became the WNBA free agency hub of all chatter, gossip and deal-making

MEDLEY, Fla. — On the eve of WNBA free agency beginning last Tuesday, several league decision-makers gathered under the same roof.

Inside Unrivaled’s Wayfair Arena, Las Vegas Aces coach Becky Hammon sat next to a basket stanchion with team president Nikki Fargas to her left, watching the end of the 3×3 league’s opening weekend. Dallas Wings front office members observed the action across the court from them. Seattle Storm brass sat off the floor in one corner of the show court, and the Los Angeles Sparks representation was a few rows up. The Atlanta Dream contingent watched closer to center court.

WNBA teams attended to support their players as well as the launch of a new league that could shift historic offseason routines and keep more star players in the U.S. during the offseason. But there was other work in Florida: Free agency negotiations officially began Tuesday.

With some convenient scheduling, Unrivaled became the epicenter of all the chatter, gossip and deal-making.

“This is the best place to be able to recruit free agents,” said Phoenix Mercury guard Natasha Cloud, who is playing on Unrivaled’s Phantom Basketball Club.

The beginning stages of Unrivaled overlapping with WNBA free agency wasn’t one of the league’s original goals, co-founder Napheesa Collier said. But it’s undoubtedly added to early buzz — Satou Sabally, for instance, used her first Unrivaled media availability to share with reporters that she had told the Wings she wanted to be traded — and it’s increased convenience for free agents, coaches and GMs.

Courtney Vandersloot is an unrestricted WNBA free agent, playing with Unrivaled Mist Basketball Club. Her first true free agency experience came after the Chicago Sky’s 2021 title. That offseason, she was playing in Russia, at UMMC Ekaterinburg, taking remote evening meetings after long practice days. “It was late nights. You’re relying on technology, hoping that the internet works,” Vandersloot said. “It doesn’t feel very personable.”

Now?

WNBA teams have posted up at hotels across the Miami area, squeezing in meetings after Unrivaled practices and around players’ schedules.

GO DEEPER

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Eight WNBA free agents, including those who are cored and restricted, are on Unrivaled rosters. Sabally, Vandersloot, Alyssa Thomas, DiJonai Carrington and Brittney Griner highlight the list. Others could potentially be on the move via trade, too. Jewell Loyd, a member of Unrivaled’s Mist Basketball Club, is on the move to the Aces, in a deal that seems likely to have a domino effect throughout the league.

Leading into Unrivaled’s opening weekend, multiple players were light-hearted about the implications of being together in one place during free agency. Vandersloot said anyone who gave her a pack of IPAs “might have a head start” in recruiting her. Sabally joked that she had already received a few cups of coffee.

Cloud said she wants what’s best for Sabally. But she added: “If that is Phoenix, I will literally tell her I will give up my apartment if she wants that too.”

As Feb. 1, the date deals can be announced, approaches, the reality of negotiations looms larger, and the quips have dissipated.

“It was a total shift. People are lingering in the hallways, having full-blown conversations,” one player granted anonymity to speak freely about the recruiting process said. “We’re not joking anymore.”

The WNBA is preparing to enter its 28th season, but robust free-agency recruiting is still a relatively new part of the winter. Aces guard Chelsea Gray said in an Uninterrupted mini-documentary about her 2020 free agency: “You hear about it happening on the men’s side. Why not have it happen on the women’s side? Why not have people be like, ‘You need to fly her out?’”

Two offseasons ago, Istanbul, Turkey, became the crossroads of the cycle as the New York Liberty, Washington Mystics, Minnesota Lynx and Storm tried figuring into the Breanna Stewart sweepstakes. A team traveling abroad demonstrated interest in building a relationship.

Now, Unrivaled is that crossroads of the free agency world, and players can conveniently build relationships with each other. Peer connections are the benefits of everyone gathering in one place.

“You’re able to talk to other players directly, and you can figure out what type of resources, how important is their team to the owners? If you have an owner of a team that doesn’t prioritize the women’s team, they’re going to talk about it, and that’s a place where I would (be) less likely to go,” Sabally said.

Players can cross-pollinate their thoughts on facilities. Multiple players at Unrivaled, both free agents and players signed to deals, said that topic had come up in the meal room, sauna and weight room.

“It’s been fun hearing players trying to get certain players to join teams. You’re kind of just able to hear other people’s experiences as well,” New York Liberty star Sabrina Ionescu said.

GO DEEPER

Unrivaled’s an instant hit, but can the new women’s basketball 3×3 league sustain?

Not every franchise flocked to Florida right away. Minnesota Lynx head coach and president of basketball Cheryl Reeve and assistant coach Eric Thibault were spotted at last Wednesday’s EuroLeague game between Fenerbahçe and Umana Reyer Venezia. Free agent bigs Emma Meesseman and Tina Charles play for the Turkish club as does former Minnesota forward Nina Milić.

But by Friday night’s Unrivaled action, they had arrived in Florida.

Lynx guard Courtney Williams said she wasn’t planning to recruit free agents. But Williams admitted that could change in an instant.

“If (Cheryl) gives me a call,” Williams said, “I’m gonna start chatting.”

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photo: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)

Culture

Book Review: ‘Shattered,’ by Hanif Kureishi

Published

13 hours ago

January 27, 2025

Press Room

Book Review: ‘Shattered,’ by Hanif Kureishi

SHATTERED: A Memoir, by Hanif Kureishi

In December 2022, in Rome, fate took Hanif Kureishi by the wrong hand. He was sitting in the living room of his girlfriend’s apartment, watching a soccer game on his iPad. Suddenly he felt dizzy. He leaned forward and blacked out. He woke up several minutes later in a pool of his own blood, his neck awkwardly twisted.

Kureishi was 68. He was rendered, instantly, paralyzed below the neck, able to wiggle his toes but unable to scratch an itch, grip a pen or feed himself, let alone walk. Kureishi, who is British Pakistani, is a well-known screenwriter and novelist. His paralysis made international news, and many began to follow his updates on his progress, which he posted via dictation on social media.

Now comes a memoir, “Shattered,” with further updates. The news this book delivers, as regards his physical condition, is not optimistic. He has progressed little. He wrestles mightily with who he is, now that he must rely on others for nearly everything except talking and breathing. His memoir is good but modestly so. It contains a great deal of black comedy but its most impressive emotion is regret — for things undone and unsaid earlier in his life.

It’s hard to get across how counterculturally famous Kureishi was in the 1980s and ’90s. He wrote the screenplay for Stephen Frears’s raffish art-house film “My Beautiful Laundrette” (1985), about a young Pakistani man who is given a derelict laundromat in London by his uncle and hopes to turn it into a success.

That movie arrived in the wake of Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” (1981), the most influential novel of the late 20th century. Both were fresh and sharply drawn works about postcolonialism and its discontents, a topic that Rushdie and Kureishi dragged, alive and squirming, to the forefront of the culture. The men became friends.

Kureishi photographed a bit better than Rushdie did. With his lion’s mane of dark curls, he resembled a pop star or a hipster prince more than a writerly mole person. Thus, it is one of the jokes in “Shattered” when Kureishi recalls the time a nurse asked, while plunging a gloved finger into his backside: “How long did it take you to write ‘Midnight’s Children’?”

He replied that if he’d written “Midnight’s Children,” he would not be in the care of England’s public health system.

In a darker parallelism, Rushdie too has written a recent memoir of horror and recovery.

Kureishi wrote the screenplay for Frears’s next movie, the romantic comedy “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid” (1987), and then published his first and best-known novel, “The Buddha of Suburbia,” in 1990. He has since written many more screenplays and novels but none have so captured the conversation.

When the press began to write about his accident, Kureishi says in “Shattered,” he began to feel like Huck Finn at his own funeral. Most of the accounts of his life and career were flattering. There is a bit of that life and career in this memoir, but more often we are in the present tense, as in: “Excuse me for a moment, I must have an enema now.”

Bodily eliminations are a central topic. He learns to get over the humiliation of not being able to cope with these on his own. Caregivers always seem to be feeling around back there. At one point Kureishi cries out to his readers, “I now designate my arse Route 66.”

The importance of touch, of small physical kindnesses, is felt in nearly every paragraph. It has ever been true: Kindness is the coin of the realm, accepted everywhere. Looking back at his life, Kureishi writes: “I wish I had been kinder; and if I get another chance, I will be.”

Remorse runs through this memoir’s veins like tracer dye. Kureishi stares hard at himself; he studies the blueprint of his own heart; he does not always like what he sees. He recalls being spoiled and self-centered and not, for example, welcoming the arrivals of his three sons. He hated taking them to sports events; he was used to doing what he wanted.

While his girlfriend and later wife, Isabella, cares for him in his new state, he wonders if he would have done the same for her. He was often distant, to her and others. His injury has brought him so much good will from so many people; he wonders if he would have reacted similarly.

Kureishi comes to feel “like a Beckettian chattering mouth, all I can do is speak, but I can also listen.” His favorite visitors are big talkers. Speaking takes a lot out of him. He remarks that “becoming paralyzed is a great way to meet new people.”

While he is in rehab, trying to regain motor skills, Kureishi confronts the contingencies of all our lives. Those around him have suffered motorcycle crashes, falls from ladders and trampolines, dives into empty swimming pools, sports injuries, a litany of freak and not-so-freak accidents.

Many incapacitated people, including famous ones like Christopher Reeve, have written books. The paralysis memoir with the most sophistication and sensitivity, that constantly taps into life’s mother lode, is “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (1997), by Jean-Dominique Bauby. He was 43, the editor of Elle France, when he suffered a brainstem stroke. He wrote his sumptuous book by blinking to select letters while the alphabet was recited to him.

“Shattered” does not reach such heights. We confront the bare wood beneath the bark of Kureishi’s best earlier writing. But he is good and bracing company on the page. His book is never boring. He offers frank lessons in resilience, about blowing the sparks that are still visible, about ringing the bells that still can ring.

SHATTERED: A Memoir | By Hanif Kureishi | Ecco | 328 pp. | $28

Culture

Scott Boras defends process after Mets owner Steve Cohen calls Pete Alonso talks ‘exhausting’

Published

1 day ago

January 26, 2025

Press Room

Scott Boras defends process after Mets owner Steve Cohen calls Pete Alonso talks ‘exhausting’

NEW YORK — Pete Alonso loomed over the New York Mets’ Amazin’ Day at Citi Field on Saturday without attending the event.

Just before Mets owner Steve Cohen answered a question about where things stand with Alonso, a homegrown star and free agent first baseman, during a panel discussion, a spirited crowd began chanting, “Let’s Sign Pete! Let’s sign Pete! Let’s sign Pete!”

Another chant then started, “Pete Al-on-so!”

Cohen then quipped, “Hold that for the end, OK?”

Cohen followed with a blunt assessment.

“We made a significant offer to Pete,” Cohen said. “He’s entitled to explore his market. That’s what he is doing. Personally, this has been an exhausting conversation and negotiation. I mean, Soto was tough — this is worse.

“A lot of it is, we made a significant offer … I don’t like the structures that are being presented back to us. It’s highly asymmetric against us. And I feel strongly about it. I will never say no. There’s always the possibility. But the reality is we’re moving forward. And as we continue to bring in players, the reality is it becomes harder to fit Pete into what is a very expensive group of players that we already have. That’s where we are. And I am being brutally honest.

“I don’t like the negotiations. I don’t like what’s been presented to us. Listen, maybe that changes. Certainly, I’ll always stay flexible. If it stays this way, I think we are going to have to get used to the fact that we may have to go forward with the existing players that we have.”

The crowd applauded the answer.

GO DEEPER

Teams looking for free-agent bats find that their options are running low

Generally, from a star player’s perspective, a short-term deal can be seen as a concession. Therefore, for three years, there might be a preference from the player’s side to have only player opt-outs and no deferred money. In Boras’ four shorter-term deals after the 2023 season, none included deferred money. On the other hand, from the team’s perspective, they may prefer more optionality on their side.

“Pete’s free-agent contract structure request are identical to the standards and practices of other clubs who have signed similarly situated qualifying-offer/all-star level players,” agent Scott Boras said. “Nothing different. Just established fairness standards.”

Last week, the Mets made a counteroffer of three years to Alonso and Boras. It was rejected.

The Mets withdrew that specific offer after it was turned down, sources familiar with the matter said. However, it’s unknown if the Mets and Alonso have since re-engaged. So whether the door is open under similar or different parameters remains a question.

The crowd at Amazin’ Day started chanting “We want Pete!” as soon as Cohen, president of baseball operations David Stearns and Carlos Mendoza took the stand for a panel hosted by SNY broadcaster Gary Cohen. When the broadcaster began asking a question about Alonso, he referred to it as “the elephant in the room.” Chants of “Pe-te” then continued.

“We all love Pete and we’ve said that many times,” Stearns said, receiving cheers. “As we’ve gone through this process, we’ve continued to express that. And we also understand that this is a business and Pete, as a free agent, deserves the right and earned the privilege to see what’s out there.

“We also feel really good about the young players who are coming through our system who have the ability to play at the major-league level.”

That’s when fans met Stearns’ words with groans and boos.

“We saw that last year. And that’s not always the most popular opinion,” Stearns continued. “We saw that last year and we will this year again.”

Without Alonso on the roster, the Mets would most likely look internally for a solution at first base. Earlier this month, Mets officials told third basemen Mark Vientos and Brett Baty to start taking reps at first base with Alonso’s future and the position for the club uncertain.

Vientos broke out as the Mets’ third baseman last year, supplanting Baty at the position. Scouts said Vientos improved defensively but still has plenty of room to grow. In the minor leagues, he also played first base.

“I love playing third base, but right now my main focus is, ‘What can I do for us to get to the World Series and win a championship?’” Vientos said. “That’s what I want.”

At Amazin’ Day, Baty sported a new jersey number — No. 7. He previously wore No. 22, meaning he needed a new number as soon as the Mets signed Juan Soto. Baty landed on No. 7 because he grew up rooting for José Reyes and Joe Mauer.

Might a new position be next?

Baty recalled Stearns telling him a couple of weeks ago, “We don’t know what’s going to happen,” and to start taking reps at first base. The next day, a first baseman’s glove arrived in the mail.

Unlike Vientos, Baty is a neophyte at first base. He last played first base sparingly as a sophomore in high school. He’s so new at the position that he said he hadn’t even thought about holding runners on or taking throws from pitchers. He said working on his footwork around the bag is the most challenging part.

Baty sees any chance at first base as an opportunity to enhance his versatility as he tries to win a job in spring training. Third base is Baty’s main position, but he played some second base last year in Triple A following a midseason demotion. In previous seasons in the minor leagues, he also played some left field.

“It’s really fun, honestly,” Baty said. “I’ve always prided myself on being as athletic as I can be. And I think athleticism, you can show it off at any position whether it be first base, second base, third base, the outfield, whatever it is.”

Mendoza stopped short of anointing anyone the first baseman. If Vientos slid over to first base, Baty, Luisangel Acuña and Ronny Mauricio, possibly among others, would comprise a competition for playing time at third base.

“We got options,” Mendoza said when asked if Vientos was the team’s first baseman as things stand. “We also got some depth there. We signed Jared Young, who has experience. Joey Meneses is a non-roster invite who has big-league experience. So we got options there. Guys are going to get the opportunity. We will see what happens.”

Meanwhile, Alonso lingers in free agency. Veteran and clubhouse leader Brandon Nimmo, also a Boras client, said he wasn’t too surprised that Alonso remains on the market because he expects his longtime teammate to take his time with the process until he saw figures to his liking.

“I would love to see Pete back with us, but I also understand that I don’t make those decisions; that’s between Pete and our front office,” Nimmo said. “From what I understand, there have been a lot of talks between them. I’m still hopeful that we will sign him. But we’re really happy with what we’ve done this offseason. We’ve made our team a better team.”

Star shortstop Francisco Lindor added, “He should make the best decision for himself, and not feel like he’s rushed into a decision. And I am sure he will. Pete is smart. And he’s going to get the input from his wife and his family and then make the best decision for himself. As he should. He deserves it.”

In the meantime, less than three weeks remain until the Mets begin reporting to spring training.