The San Francisco Giants‘ offseason cannot be salvaged. And the collapse of the team’s historic agreement with Carlos Correa will impact them long beyond the coming season.
Those are my knee-jerk reactions to the news I and so many in the baseball world woke up to Wednesday morning — that Correa had agreed to terms on a 12-year, $315 million deal with the New York Mets. They were followed by the thought that, if you’re a Giants fan, it’s appropriate that this shocking development dropped on the winter solstice — the darkest day of the year.
But knee-jerk reactions are one thing. Sober analysis is another. So let’s do our best to look beyond the thick clouds that so often obscure San Francisco Bay. What, if anything, can the Giants do to regenerate some enthusiasm and hope before next season arrives?
There are undoubtedly segments of Giants fans relieved that the 13-year Correa deal came apart. I understand where those fans are coming from, too. So much of baseball analysis has trended toward the actuarial that, in my mind, too many fans follow the game through the lens of risk analysis, as if it were their millions at stake when a big contract is signed, not the owner’s.
That avenue of analysis is fascinating — it’s what I mostly do, after all — but at the same time: It’s baseball. It’s about winning big games in high-stakes situations and getting to watch the kind of players your children will remember seeing even after they grow up.
Carlos Correa is that kind of player. He would have been in the spotlight in San Francisco, as the face of the Giants for years to come — more than he’ll be in the superstar cast of New York. He’ll certainly garner plenty of attention in Flushing, but given the cluster of future Hall of Famers who have gathered to play at Citi Field, that bright light will have to be divided among a number of players.
Those sentiments aside, this does actually come down to risk analysis. The original Correa deal (13 years, $350 million) was a risky play by the Giants at the outset. That’s mostly due to Correa’s injury history, not his performance record, although eventually those lenses tend to blur together. Someone in the Giants’ organization — the front office, ownership or both — thought the risk/reward factors favored making the deal.
And then something changed. Right now, we’re not sure what, beyond vague allusions to medical concerns. For the Giants, the risk/reward assessment at that point leaned too much toward risk for their comfort, and the whole thing fell apart. Correa moved on quickly and signed with the Mets before sunrise.
In New York, Steve Cohen has raised the practice of taking on risk to a new art form. For all the talk about the current CBA operating as a de facto salary cap in baseball, that’s clearly not the case in Queens. Yes, there are real constraints on spending in the current structure, but there is nothing to prevent a super-rich owner like Cohen from spending whatever he wants, if he’s willing to live with the payroll obligation and the toll it takes on the bottom line.
Obviously the Mets are at one end of the risk/reward spectrum. At some point, though, you have to wonder whether the Giants, at least among the large-market teams, have landed at the other end, and that’s not a place you want to be. Cohen is an outlier, and no one is suggesting that every owner should do what he does. However, under their current regime, the Giants can afford to take on a lot more risk than they are right now.
Granted, San Francisco had an unwieldy financial situation when Farhan Zaidi was brought in to run the front office. The payroll was bloated; the roster was old; and the minor league system was unproductive. Zaidi cleaned that up while keeping the team competitive on the field.
But next season — Zaidi’s fifth in the organization — the only player on the current roster with a sizable commitment beyond 2024 is Mitch Haniger, and there are none after 2025. The plan all along was supposed to have been to build up the pipeline while overhauling organizational processes and streamlining the out-of-whack payroll, then spend. Some of that has been accomplished, though we are still waiting to see whether the Giants can be a steady producer of talent from their development system. Still, they seem stuck in the starting block.
This is not the Tampa Bay Rays. It’s not the Milwaukee Brewers or the Kansas City Royals. The Giants play in a major market in one of the most beautiful venues in the sport and have a fan base that fills the seats when the team is relevant. They are a franchise with the financial might to compete with the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres in their own division.
After the Correa news, their ability to do that seems very far away. Before the Correa news emerged, I had the Giants as a .500-ish team in the middle of the NL pack. Under Zaidi, the Giants have tended to outperform my projections and the offseason isn’t over yet, so it wasn’t a bad position to be in. Now, the Giants look closer to the Arizona Diamondbacks in the NL West than the Dodgers or Padres, and their playoff odds have dropped from about 28% to 13%.
There is no real pivot from here, not this offseason, which before the apparent Correa signing was marked by the Giants’ failed pursuit of hometown hero Aaron Judge. Maybe, after muddling through the 2023 campaign, the Giants can go big in a future offseason. There might not be as many alluring candidates as there were this winter, which featured an incredibly talented free agent class. But there are always options — Shohei Ohtani, after all, will be a free agent next winter.
Which brings to mind another Scott Boras client who could interest the Giants in the future: Juan Soto. You can’t help but wonder whether there will be ancillary consequences from the Correa collapse, especially when it comes to Boras. Money is money, but Boras can’t be too pleased with what has transpired concerning his most prized free agent of this offseason.
Maybe Correa’s career path from here will eventually justify the Giants’ decision. But we won’t know how that turns out for years, and for now, there is the matter of the current offseason. There is no other Carlos Correa left on the market, or even anyone close to his stature. For now, all the Giants can do is target the remaining second- and third-tier free agents, which is what they’ve done so far this hot stove season. Make value plays. Create depth and flexibility. Keep doing what they’ve been doing for four years and hope their fans don’t lose their remaining patience.
As for the question of how the Giants come back from this, though — in the end, the analysis of this deal winds up right back where my original knee-jerk assessment of this news did.
This Giants’ offseason cannot be salvaged, not on the darkest day of the year, and not even when the days grow longer and the fog begins to clear from San Francisco Bay.