Mets, Carlos Correa reportedly agree to 12-year, $315M contract after Giants flagged medical issue
Free agent shortstop Carlos Correa won’t be going to the San Francisco Giants after all.
Hours after the Giants postponed Correa’s introductory news conference on Tuesday, in the wee small hours of the morning on the East Coast, the New York Mets swooped in and reportedly offered Correa a 12-year, $315 million deal to play third base, and he accepted.
According to Jon Heyman of the New York Post, Correa’s team disagreed with the Giants regarding a medical issue.
Correa, 28, had first reportedly agreed to a 13-year, $350 million contract with the Giants back on Dec. 13. San Francisco had made a substantial offer (reportedly around $360 million) to slugging outfielder Aaron Judge, but lost out when he decided to re-sign with the New York Yankees. Correa was reportedly at the top of their offseason to-do list, and would have been a major improvement for a team that struggled to repeat their surprising 2021 success.
Then, just hours before Correa was reportedly going to be introduced in a news conference on Tuesday, the Giants suddenly postponed it. No reason was given, but according to the Associated Press, an unknown medical issue had come up during Correa’s physical. Since deals don’t go forward until a physical is done and approved, the Giants apparently chose to wait to introduce him until it was figured out.
We don’t know what the Giants would have done from there. They may have renegotiated Correa’s contract, or cancelled the deal altogether. And now we’ll never know what they would have done. The Giants may not have even imagined that the Mets and their extremely rich owner, Steve Cohen, could come swooping in like a giant bird of prey to steal one of their targets like a tasty snack, but that appears to be just what they did.
The Mets’ spending spree
The Mets came into the offseason in a slightly tricky situation. They won 101 regular season games, but spent the back half of the season slowly giving up the 10-game lead they’d amassed in the National League East. They lost the division and were then eliminated in the wild-card playoff series.
So how do you improve a team that won 101 games but still weren’t good enough to win it all? Cohen believes he’s figured out the answer: spend all the money. All of it. And he’s done just that.
Some of those guys were on the team last year (like Edwin Diaz). Some of them were signed to replace similar players that had moved on (like Justin Verlander). But Correa doesn’t fall into either of those categories. He’s a full-on 100 percent improvement to their roster, and makes the NL East scarier and more competitive, somehow. If Cohen’s mission is to make sure the Mets don’t play an outstanding regular season that ends mere days after the playoffs start, he may be closer than ever to accomplishing it.
Source: Yahoo Sports
