As you may recall, there was some Carlos Correa-related consternation in Giantsland over the offseason. They’d signed him, which was great. Then they hadn’t signed him, which wasn’t great. Then the Mets had signed him, which wasn’t great. Then the Mets hadn’t signed him, which was the point at which the writers were just throwing in plot twists to surprise the audience instead of serving the story, which had fallen apart. Then the Twins signed him, for real, no foolsies, which, okay, fine. The story just needed to end already, so whatever. And then they gave C3PO his memories back, which was both clearly telegraphed and also an invalidation of his sacrifice earlier in the movie, a cardinal storytelling sin.
I may be projecting my issues with The Rise of Skywalker onto this, but that’s neither here nor there.
So instead of signing with the Giants for 13 years, Correa signed with the Twins for 6; instead of moving Brandon Crawford to third base and having Correa at short, the Giants went with David Villar and JD Davis at third, facilitating what’s been a great year for Davis; instead of not calling up Casey Schmitt because the left side of the infield was full, the Giants instead called up Casey Schmitt because the left side of the infield was very much not full, which has gone well.
Also, Carlos Correa has been extremely bad at hitting this year. Seems relevant!
On the year, Correa is hitting .213/.302/.396. He’s been better in May, slashing .211/.317/.437 (not including yesterday’s game, which raised all of those numbers a bit), but that still isn’t in the neighborhood of $330 million production. All of that raises the question: Hey, what gives? This guy was supposed to be good. He was good for a long time. The Giants tried to give him a lot of hypothetical money to be good. And now he’s not good? Preposterous! The version of me in a universe where I care is pissed off. Why is it happening???
So the first, most obvious thing here is that Correa is getting unlucky. If you’ve been talking about baseball online for a while, you’ll know that the first thing you look at when a player’s performance is surprising is his BABIP, because that tells an important part of the story. For Correa, his BABIP this year is .252, shockingly low, which indicates there’s some positive regression coming. His walk rate is still good, his strikeout rate is up a little but not catastrophically, and he’s hitting the ball hard a little less often than he did last year, but it’s not a massive change. So not too different, right?
Well, not exactly. Looking at Baseball Savant, Correa’s expected batting average and slugging percentage have both plummeted, and his expected wOBA shows that he’s gone from being a significantly above average hitter to a below average one. Digging into it a little further, he’s been swinging through more fastballs than he has in any year in his career and he’s completely fallen apart against breaking balls. Again, this is all based on expected wOBA, so the low BABIP isn’t really relevant here. He is having one of the worst years of his career.
But would this have happened if Carlos Correa were on the Giants?
That’s really the question that matters, as much as any of this matters. Did the Giants try their hardest to give a third of a billion dollars to someone who can’t hit anymore? Was it just the chief medical officer overriding the captain’s decision that saved them? Is their player evaluation process that broken?
And the answer is…probably not. Fangraphs had an article yesterday called Carlos Correa’s Slow Start Should Turn Around Quickly, which took a very hard look at his swing data from the last few years to look at what’s happening. The conclusion the article came to was essentially that he’ll be fine. He’s a little off mechanically — his swing is too flat — and once he tinkers with that enough to fix it, he’ll be back to normal.
I mean, maybe. I’m not too sure that the fix is so easy — a quarter of a season is a long time to let something like that go if you can solve it in an afternoon — but it does make the Giants look a little better. Because oh baby, can they tinker with a swing. They’ll use video and biomechanics and Trackman and whatever piece of software I haven’t heard of but is the standard at Driveline and dive into it. There’s no guarantee they’ll get it done, of course, but it’s a fair bet that the swing Carlos Correa would have with the Giants is different than the one he has in reality with the Twins.
And again, the underlying stats are still really similar to last year’s stats. That excellent hitter is still in there. The Giants did not offer all that money to a lemon, unless you count his ankle possibly being made of paper mache. The player evaluation process was fine, despite the poor results so far this year. It just didn’t work out for them, and now that Correa’s back in Minnesota, it’s not working out for them either, but for a very different reason.
Carlos Correa.
Who is care.