No, you were going to write about the Giants’ risk-averse offseason in your newsletter. Obviously I wasn’t going to do that. Ridiculous!
Ahem.
After an offseason of moves that mostly vacillated between Small and Non, peaking at Mid-Sized with Mitch Haniger, the Giants landed the hell out of a huge fish, signing Carlos Correa to a 13 year, $350 million deal that will keep him in San Francisco through his age 40 season.
Since free agency started, this is only the third time the Giants have gone out and signed one of the consensus top two players on the market (apologies to Johnny Cueto, who was one of the top guys after 2015, but not nearly as coveted as David Price, Zack Greinke, or Jason Heyward). The first was Barry Bonds after the 1993 season, and the second was Barry Zito after the 2006 season.
One of those went as well as could be hoped. The other did not result in the team winning two World Series, but also had its pluses.
But all that’s in the past. The present of the Giants, and the future of the Giants, is Carlos Correa. Those 13 years will take him through the 2035 season, which is just a preposterous thing to consider, so I’m gonna mentally edit that to the much more reasonable “forever.”
Carlos Correa will be around forever. Now that’s plausible.
Now, forever is an awfully long time. Baesball players tend to age and get worse, so signing a player who is guaranteed to do that for this extremely large number of years seems like you are buying an awful lot of bad years to go along with the good ones. However, there are a few factors at play here, as we discussed in the newest episode of the McCovey Chroncast.
Oh, hey, how’d that get there? Weird. Guess you’d better click and listen to it.
For the Giants, signing Correa to that long of a deal makes sense because they are paying essentially the same amount of money that they would be paying if it was an 8- or 10- year deal, but they are spreading the luxury tax bill out over a longer period of time, which will allow them greater flexibility in avoiding bills for going over the luxury tax. For Correa, it makes sense because you only get one mega-deal, so you might as well just stick with one team for the rest of your career because you’ll get more money that way.
But more importantly, it makes sense because this is the cost of getting a great baseball player on your baseball team in free agency. Sure, you could draft and develop a star, and then guarantee he’ll be around for several years at cut-rate prices. But what if your farm system isn’t doing that? Or what if they are doing that, but not that often? Or what if they are doing that, and even pretty often, but you still have a chance to get Carlos Correa on your team? You take it. Of course you take it, because he’s a great baseball player.
Correa is a usually good and occasionally great defensive shortstop. He has generally not been as good as Brandon Crawford at shortstop but he is still comfortably above average. As a hitter, he’s outstanding. Last year, Fangraphs had him fourth among shortstops in offensive value; in 2021, he was fifth. In terms of process, he hits the ball hard, has high expected wOBA and average and slugging, barrels it very frequently, walks often, does a reasonably good job of avoiding strikeouts, and is above average in chase rate. He does everything you want a player to do in the batter’s box, and he plays a strong shortstop to boot.
Carlos Correa also cheated to win the 2017 World Series, but to be fair, it was against the Dodgers, so you have to look at both sides.
So not only is Correa a great player, but he’s a great player who chose the Giants in free agency. Yes, the Giants outbid the Twins by (per reports) three years and $65 million, but of course they did. The Giants were never going to be outbid for a huge star by the Minnesota Twins. Was not going to happen, full stop. Not only did they need to sign a difference-maker who could be in the lineup every day (and oh boy, did they need to do that), but they needed something for fans to get excited about.
Last year, the team had plenty of good moments, but they weren’t exciting. They were 81-81, and they felt like it. As much as fan feeling about Mike Yastrzemski or LaMonte Wade Jr is a general, “Sure, I like him,” they were not must-watch players last year. Really, they spent much of the year as the exact opposite of must-watch. Joc Pederson was great for stretches and awful for stretches; Wilmer Flores was big in clutch situations and nothing special in normal ones; Austin Slater crushed lefties and tried hard against righties.
So what’s the meaning of Carlos Correa signing with the Giants, beyond the obvious (it’s good to have good baseball players)? In one sense, not much. The Giants, a rich but otherwise normal baseball team, offered the most money to a star free agent and he took it and will now be on the Giants. As Giants fans, we thought this couldn’t or wouldn’t happen because of recent history; humans are pattern-finding animals and we looked at Jon Lester, Giancarlo Stanton, Bryce Harper, and Aaron Judge all spurning the Giants and thought, “There’s something wrong with the Giants and every major league superstar knows about it.”
It turns out, there isn’t! Or at least, there’s nothing so wrong that $65 million can’t cure it. Which makes the Giants…normal. There wasn’t some grand anti-San Francisco conspiracy. Lester was comfortable with Theo Epstein. Stanton wanted to win and thought (rightfully) that the Yankees were better bets. Harper wanted to play with Phillies manager Gabe Kapler. Judge liked being in New York. It’s not necessary to connect any dots here. The only connection is that the Giants weren’t that good for a while, so there wasn’t any real reason to pick them over a similar offer. Correa didn’t get a similar offer, so he’s a Giant now.
But also, it does mean something. It means the team is trying, that it’s possible for the Giants to have the nice things that sometimes we think only other teams get to have. It means that we don’t have to look at the roster as an island of misfit toys. It means that there will be at least one hitter who is actually in the damn lineup every day, and isn’t subject to the vagaries of platoons. It means stability and production. It means they’ll have more than just words when they talk about a commitment to winning.
And it means we get to watch Carlos Correa, an excellent baseball player, through his prime and up to the end of his career. This is a good thing for me and you, people who will not personally be paying him hundreds of millions of dollars. There are always risks with huge contracts, always possibilities of catastrophe. But Correa also brings huge upside, massive upside, the kind of upside that you’d be a fool to ignore.
This year and for a lot of years to come, Carlos Correa makes the Giants much, much better. I’d spend my own money on that, and I’d sure as hell spend Charles Johnson’s money on it. The Giants needed a Correa-type player. Now they have one. That’s a good day’s work.
Is this a safe space to make fun of "Correa is the worst signing in SFG history" tweets? It is?
Wonderful:
https://twitter.com/TBlair64/status/1603158070086901760
"Carlos Correa also cheated to win the 2017 World Series, but to be fair, it was against the Dodgers, so you have to look at both sides."
LUV THIS!
(You and Brisbee are heaping on the schadenfreude today:
"They had Yasiel Puig, Mike Marshall and Steve Garvey. They started it.")