More ‘Screw It‘ Please
I read a lot of stories about the Giants getting cold feet about Carlos Correa and the free agent stud shortstop bolting to the Mets in a somewhat unprecedented fashion, but I think our local fav, Grant Brisbee had the best piece about it.
First of all, and despite the group text, the Giants backing out at the 11th hour on a Scott Boras player does NOT mean the Giants will never sign a Boras-represented stud player…just ask the Mets about that. Something very similar happened recently, or – as Brisbee points out – about as similar as you’ll find to the Correa/Giants ordeal.
The Mets had a stud represented by Boras, got nervous about the medicals very late and backed out from signing him. Granted, Kumar Rocker was a draft pick (not a free agent) who couldn’t just sign with another team – a very key difference, one that comes with compensatory picks – there are a lot of pertinent similarities.
Per Brisbee:
This is relevant to your interests because of the obvious connections. It’s not just a Boras client; it’s a Boras client and the Mets. And it’s not just a draft pick gone wrong; it’s an exciting player getting yanked away from the fans because of a physical. The team couldn’t really respond how it wanted to, which made for asymmetric warfare with the most talented agent in the history of the game. The fans were alienated and bitter.
It’s not a completely identical situation, but it’s as close as you can possibly get, and it happened about 16 months ago. It’s both amusing and uncanny how similar these stories are.
But it’s more relevant to your interests because the long-term effects didn’t include an inability by the Mets to work with Boras. It didn’t affect the Mets’ ability to attract future free agents. Whatever negative vibes they irradiated their fans with went away as soon as the team started winning and spending money. Agents have a short memory. Players have a short memory. And while it doesn’t feel like it right now, fans have a short memory.
I needed that, Brisbee!
But Brisbee doesn’t let the Giants off the hook that easily. They may be taking a measured approach to major investments, but a measured approach won’t pan out with the big-time free agents. The market is set by illogical spenders.
Makes sense in a world without irrational actors. Except that’s not the world we live in. In this world, Steve Cohen takes the X-ray of Correa’s ankle and eats it, piece by piece, before swinging away on a vine and screaming, “Let’s Go Mets!” The Giants will always lose to someone like that. And Boras isn’t going to hold their hand while they figure it out.
And later:
This is a team that needs Screw It, and it needs it in abundance. This is a $3 billion franchise that’s being run like it’s a ward of McKinsey & Company. Hey, it might mean better short-term profit margins for the ownership group, and that kind of reasonable, sensible approach is pretty safe for the owners. But that doesn’t mean it will be entertaining for the fans, and baseball happens to be an entertainment business. Bryce Harper would sure be entertaining, but there wasn’t enough Screw It to get him here.
A-effin’-men, Grant. – PAL
Source: The Giants were willing to take a risk on Carlos Correa, until they weren’t,” Grant Brisbee, The Athletic (12/22/2022)
TOB: Phil wrote this prior to the morning of Christmas Eve. That is significant because another bomb in this story dropped just before we were set to publish:
This news certainly puts the Giants’ decision in a new light, doesn’t it? I can’t exactly say I told you so, but while I was pretty upset about losing Correa, I did want to see how the Mets’ physical went. Here’s an exchange on Twitter between 95.7 The Game host Mark Willard and me. The first three are right after the Correa to Mets news broke and the last was after the Mets’ physical news broke:
I get that everyone needs to react. Everyone needs a take. And privately I was pretty angry. But publicly, before going on the record ripping a team for something like this, don’t you think someone like Willard (and so many others like him; he’s not unique in this regard) should wait until they have full information?
I also saw insane questions like this, after the Giants signed outfielder Michael Conforto to a 2 year, $36M contract (which he can opt out of after 1 year):
Like, come on. This is so stupid and reactionary. These deals aren’t remotely the same. There is very little risk in the Conforto deal. There’s a ton of risk in the Correa deal. People need to chill.
Why Sign ANYONE to a 10+ Year Contract?
I thought baseball learned its lesson about super long contracts. Do we not remember how this went for the Angels with Albert Puljos? What about Cabrera with the Tigers? The second half of those long-term deals did not go well, the franchise players did not bring with them a World Series title, and they became a milestone attraction (as in, “come see Albert Puljos chase 3,000 hits”). And yet, per ESPN, super long contracts are all the rage. What happened?
Alden Gonzalez and Jesse Rogers do a nice job dissecting the trend.
(1) Luxury tax is based off of the A.A.V. of player contract (average annual value), so teams can limit a contract’s impact on the books by stretching it out over a longer period of time. “The contracts for Correa, Turner and Bogaerts all rank within the top 15 all-time in total value — but none are within the top 25 in AAV.”
(2) Great players get to free agency at a younger age. Players are eligible for free agency after 6 years of MLB service time. For a long time, that meant almost all the players entered free agency in their 30s, after rising through the minor league. That’s no longer the case. 10-year contracts aren’t as scary when the guys signing them are in their twenties.
“The past three offseasons have seen a total of 581 players become free agents before turning 30, according to research by ESPN Stats & Information. If you go back nearly a decade, to the three-year span from 2012 to 2014, that number was only 182. The game, in essence, keeps getting younger.”
(3) The universal DH doesn’t hurt either when teams consider the back end of these contracts for position players (and only position players are signing long-term deals).
(4) Crazy rich owners going crazy. Plus, they think they are close. That’s why the Padres, Phillies, and Mets are spending money like drunken sailors, and whether they are smart or not, that crazy sets the market price for free agents.
As you read about these recent FA signings, whether your team got or lost guys, this is an interesting breakdown of why these crazy long-term deals for hundreds of millions of dollars are not as scary to some teams. – PAL
Source: “The winter of the epic contract: How decade-plus MLB megadeals suddenly became a thing,” Alden Gonzalez & Jesse Rogers, ESPN (12/23/2022)
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Oh, the silent majesty of a winter’s morn… the clean, cool chill of the holiday air… and an asshole in his bathrobe, emptying a chemical toilet into my sewer…
Clark W. Griswold
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