The Giants had Aaron Judge for seven minutes and Carlos Correa for seven days.
Both will play in New York next season.
Yes, the Giants were set to sign “Arson Judge” — their top free agent target and a Northern California native — according to a tweet from MLB news breaker Jon Heyman earlier this month. That tweet was quickly debunked and deleted, and Judge returned to the Yankees.
But then Correa agreed to the largest contract in club history last week. The Giants had pivoted and landed the superstar player the team desperately needed.
Only Correa never signed the contract.
The Giants were set to announce the shortstop’s arrival in San Francisco on Tuesday. Instead, three hours before that celebratory press conference, the team “postponed” it without explanation. The Associated Press reported that the team was concerned about something its medical staff found during Correa’s physical exam.
Perhaps the physical found something serious.
If it did, the New York Mets don’t seem to care about it.
The Giants balked, and Correa struck a new agreement with the Mets overnight, worth almost the same annual salary as the Giants’ deal, to play third base in New York.
My official diagnosis: cold feet.
There is a world where the Giants dodged not one but two bullets by missing out on making decade-plus, multimillion-dollar commitments to Judge and now Correa.
That world will not come into focus for several years. It might never come.
The world we live in now is one of complete, abject embarrassment for the Giants.
There was a good way for this offseason to go. There was a bad way, too. Then there was this way, which is the bad way, only much worse.
Weird things happen in baseball all the time, but this saga is unique, and that’s what makes it so disastrous for the Giants.
They’re an organization that was looking to prove it was big-time this winter, only to be big-timed in an almost unimaginable way.
Giants fans should be angry. They deserve a full explanation for why the team was unable to get Correa to sign on the dotted line.
It’s time to violate some HIPAA laws: What body parts were in question and what was wrong with them? Why wasn’t Correa wearing a No. 1 jersey over a dress shirt and tie on Tuesday?
As of Wednesday, it sure sounds as if the Giants were dawdling at worst and unnecessarily scrupulous at best.
Correa’s agent, Scott Boras, told Ken Rosenthal that he gave the Giants “reasonable time” to finalize the deal.
“We reached an agreement. We had a letter of agreement. We gave them a time frame to execute it,” Boras said. “They advised us they still had questions. They still wanted to talk to other people, other doctors, go through it.”
So Boras told the Giants, “If you’re not going to execute, I need to go talk with other teams.”
And that’s what Boras did.
This isn’t to exonerate Correa or Boras — they reneged on a massive deal. Boras is in spin mode.
But it’s clear that the Giants aren’t victims here.
And it’s telling that they’re not in spin mode.
Until the Giants provide an outstanding excuse as to why it’s not their fault Correa is a Met — and one might not exist — this is a failure of the highest order for the organization.
This is a defining failure, a stink that isn’t going to wash out for a long, long time.
It’d be one thing to miss out on both free agents after promising fans a big offseason. It’s a whole other thing to agree to terms with one, to have that agreement last for a week, and then for that player to back out of it at the last minute for reasons that seem flimsy at best.
No one likes a tease.
The Giants look — at best — like a mark.
The worst part of it all: Because it took a week for the deal to fall through, there’s no recourse for the Giants. Correa was the second option behind Judge. There is no third option the team can attack now that the Correa deal has fallen through.
They can’t even amalgamate his production with second-tier free agents. They’re all gone, too.
So now the Giants have no chance to do anything important in 2023 because they were unable to add anyone significant to the roster this offseason.
They made promises. Those promises were not kept.
And now the Giants are more or less back where they started: in third place in the National League West.
Actually, third place might be a win in 2023.
This is a team that has lost roughly a million fans since Farhan Zaidi took over as the team’s top personnel man. Attendance at Oracle Park was 3.3 million in 2017. Last season, following a 107-win campaign, it was 2.4 million.
How many more fans will decide to not spend top dollar on a mid-priced team? (Outside of the Giants-Mets four-game series at Oracle Park that starts April 20, of course.) I’d imagine a lot more.
The fans that do remain have two new mortal enemies, though:
Correa, obviously, and the Giants’ brass, too.
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