NEWSLETTER
It’s such an outsized story – in importance and in craziness – that I find myself checking in on the Carlos Correa Saga with considerable regularity, even as nothing has developed lately.
All we know, at last check, is that, after they swooped in to snag Correa from the Giants (who’d backed away because of a medical issue with his surgically-repaired leg), the Mets raised the same medical concern and no deal has yet been officially finalized. We are approaching a week since Correa’s physical with the Mets, and the assumption has been that the sides are trying to find a way to make the reported 12-year, $315 million signing work.
The latest status update? Still mostly silence:
Uh oh, down from 55% to just 51%! (That is mostly a joke, but the last report did have it at 55/45 a deal would get done with the Mets.)
I think what Morosi said there tracks with common sense. With nearly a week gone by since Correa’s physical and NO word of actual talks with other teams, we can safely conclude that both Correa’s camp and the Mets are sincerely and earnestly trying to make a version of this deal work. There are probably just a whole lot of finer details to negotiate, draft, re-write, negotiate, etc., and you throw the holiday there into the middle of it, and it doesn’t seem all that odd that it would take a week+ to get to a revised agreement.
Unlike in the Giants situation, where Scott Boras smartly sprinted toward an overly aggressive owner to get a new deal locked down as quickly as possible, there is no other available suitor quite like that now. And Boras also knows that this medical issue has been flagged twice by teams that REEEEAAAALLY wanted to sign this guy. So even if Boras did start shopping around for a back-up offer, it wouldn’t be pretty.
That’s probably a bit of the game of chicken going on right now: the Mets know that Correa’s market would be crushed if he had to head back out (so they don’t want to do the original deal), but Boras and Correa know he’s got a pretty good grievance available if the Mets back out (so they don’t want to move off of the original deal). In the meantime, they’ll negotiate about incentives or missed-time language or whatever. It’s a lot to work through, I’m sure.
The only way this deal falls apart is if the Mets feel like the risks to Correa’s future health are so great that they could not possibly sign him for anything remotely close to 12 years and $315 million, and are willing to risk losing a grievance in a couple years after Correa is forced to sign something much shorter and for much less of a guarantee.
That 51 to 55% range sure sounds right to me about a deal getting done with the Mets. If that doesn’t happen, I wouldn’t quite say all bets are off on where he goes – the Giants and Twins seem the most likely, on a reduced contract. But a minuscule part of me wonders if the Cubs have been slow to sign another bat on the chance Correa does have to hit the market again, and would have to be open to the kind of short-term, high-AAV deal they might want to do.
