The Curious Case of Carlos Corrrea

 From my vantage point, Carlos Correa is a highly-talented ballplayer. Distinguished? A deserving all-star? Definitely Can't imagine the team who wouldn't welcome him into their locker room.

Correa plays shortstop, a position demanding extraordinary flexibility, balance, quickness and a throwing arm that is both powerful and accurate. Correa is no slouch at the plate, either. Correa sports a lifetime batting average of .279 and an OPS of .836. His calculated WAR over a 162 game schedule is 7.2.

All are well above average.

So in a free-agent market, it stands that Correa—at age 28—is certainly going to attract attention.

Which he has.

But however talented a two-way player he is, there are questions about his durability. Over his eight-year career, he has played in just 888 games. That's an average of 111 games a year, or about two-thirds of the MLB schedule.

Expected to be offered a Grade-A ginormous contract, Correa landed one. The San Francisco Giants offered him a thirteen-year contract for 350 million-dollars. Translated, that means he'd be earning 26.9 million-dollars per season through the age of forty.

I should clarify that I have no bone to pick with Correa. He has become a significant player at a very difficult position. And as pointed out earlier, he can field and hit. And if Giants owner Charles Johnson wants to drop 771,617 pounds of dollar bills into Correa's lap, Correa would be a fool to refuse it.

But then something happened.

In contrast to the dozens of MLB owners who mindlessly dispense decades-long contracts for hundreds of millions of dollars, the Giants paused and activated their brains. And if that isn't shocking enough, know the Giants backed out of the deal, stating there were medical issues that prohibited them from moving forward.

Ignoring the lack of precedent, Correa's agent (the insufferable Scott Boras) immediately dialed up the free-spending owner of the New York Mets. Informed of the newly-available Correa, owner Steve Cohen immediately offered Correa a nearly identical contract.

And then something happened—again.

While perusing Correa's medical record, the Mets happened upon the same issue that stopped the Giants in their tracks. And their offer remains unsigned as well. I'm sure Correa and Boras are very, very frustrated.

I'm an old guy. Been following baseball for over half-a-century. While initially excited by free-agency, salaries have become an absurd joke. And while neophytes might wonder how these teams pay these enormous salaries, the answer is they don't.

You do.

And as a result, baseball (like other sports) has become increasingly inaccessible to the people at the core of its fandom.

So I'm heartened to see owners engaging their brains before rubber-stamping contracts that are—at best—questionable. And before you label me as anti-labor, know that the era of grossly underpaid professional athlete ended roughly forty-years ago.

Yes, theoretically baseball players ought to be able to make any amount of money possible—just like you. And yes, baseball owners ought to be able to pay their employees whatever amount the market will bear.

The problem is that baseball remains a consumer product, dependent on millions and millions of fans being able to consume it. And the more out of reach the game becomes, the harder it will be to locate the legions of followers required for its survival.

I hope this contract re-think is only the first of many to come. And if my views upset Correa and Boras, please remind them that if I regularly showed up for work just two-thirds of the time, I wouldn't be negotiating a thirteen-year, 350 million-dollar contract.

I'd be unemployed.

My NBA Free-Agent Afterflow

For whatever reason, NBA free-agents do not want to play for the Chicago Bulls. It can't be the weather, as past signings by the New York Knicks, Boston Celtics, Philadelphia 76ers and Detroit Pistons have shown.

The Brooklyn Nets proved it again last Sunday.

It can't be that the Bulls lack credibility, as the legacy of their Jordan-era dynasty continues to resound across the NBA landscape.

So what is it, then?

My two cents says long-time owner Jerry Reinsdorf continues to be perceived as the guy who let unpopular general manager Jerry Krause break-up the Bulls. While this is a vast over-simplification (there was an abundance of blame to share), it remains a free-agent toxin.

Krause's actions said management is in charge here—not you.

Compounding the damage is the fact that with two hand-picked successors still making player-related decisions, this (wrongly or rightly) screams AND WE HAVEN'T CHANGED A BIT!

With his death and subsequent election to the Hall of Fame, you could say Krause has successfully rehabilitated his image. It isn't so easy for Reinsdorf. In a player's league like the twenty-first century NBA, how does an owner answer the question how could you fire Michael Jordan?

In retrospect, Reinsdorf's biggest mistake was not creating a buffer between Krause and his players. However gifted Krause was at assessing talent, he was a frequently insufferable human being with a cloying need to be one of the guys.

Despite his considerable sway within the organization, this puppy-like need for inclusion made him an easy target. It exploded into outright derision after his universally-misquoted comment about an organization's role in winning championships.

So without a popularly-accepted transformation, the Bulls remain cast as a management-heavy franchise where even a once-in-a-lifetime player like Michael Jordan was kicked to the curb to suit management's desires.

It's not accurate—or fair. But so little in life is.

So the Bulls go it alone. With a hugely-talented core of young (albeit injury-prone) players and another smart pick at number seven in Coby White, the Bulls again appear on the verge of greatness. Even without visits from Kawhi Leonard and Kevin Durant.

But I'd be lying if I said I didn't care that the Bulls aren't the favored destination of big-name free agents, a la the Los Angeles Lakers. My fandom would be made immensely more comfortable if the Bulls needed only to clear cap space and wait for favored suitors.

Alas, that isn't a luxury destined to be theirs.

The Bulls have become something of a (cough) square peg. An outlier. An entity that, when confronted with a very public and very unpleasant bruhaha, held fast to the people it knew best and longest.

In other words, Jerry Krause was a longtime employee of Jerry Reinsdorf. Right or wrong, it was very unlikely he was going to throw Krause under the bus to save the skins of Johnny-come-latelys like Phil Jackson and Jordan.

If loyalty is a crime, the Bulls can give you a line-by-line itemization of the sentence.

In their stints as GMs, Jackson and Jordan have shown their criticisms of Krause to be baseless. Indefensible. Comically ignorant. Neither had (or in the case of Jordan, has) a clue.

Karma is a bitch.

And in their clunky, old-fashioned way, the Bulls' M.O. remains firmly rooted in the past. Much as my antiquated, sixties-liberal, greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number politics do.

So yes, I remain a fan.

Even when their free-agent signings amount to Thaddeus Young, Luke Kornet and Tomas Satoransky.

Lacking the sun-kissed glamor of the Lakers, their crosstown rivals the Clippers and the Miami Heat or the mega-market promotional opportunities of the Knicks and Nets, the Bulls possess just one thing: heart.

As the world of sport is increasingly subsumed by the complexities of contract management and the endless search for new revenue streams, that is something.

Manny Machado and the Free-Agent Log Jam

Sssshhh. Did you hear that? It almost sounded like a pen on paper. 

Wait—it was!

Holy crap! Could the collusion really be over? Are baseball players once again free to sign decades-long guaranteed contracts for outrageous sums of money? And are addled MLB owners once again able to protect their pockets from the stacks of cash burning a hole in them?

Oh great day in the morning! We are saved! Saved!

Like you, I'm relived beyond description to learn that Manny Machado has signed a ten-year, three-hundred million-dollar guaranteed contract with the San Diego Padres. And that the disconcerting free-agent log-jam may soon be history.

This because I am amused by the sight of successful businessmen tossing logic to the wind as they unlearn everything they (presumably) learned while (presumably) building-up their businesses. Perhaps Bill James has done a cost-benefit analysis of long-term contracts and assigned them a WAR rating. 

But I haven't seen it.

So I'll fearlessly expose myself to public ridicule and venture to say that a MLB owner has to be certifiable to even entertain the idea of one. At least as certifiable as an athlete would be to turn one down.

Is there a soul extant who feels that Albert Pujols or Miguel Cabrera or Robinson Cano or Prince Fielder are anywhere near the players they were when they signed these contracts? Or will be when they expire?

Are major league owners even semi-cognizant of this?

Sure, I'm jealous. Aren't you?

Where jealousy turns to agitation is when it becomes apparent who pays for these contracts. And that's me. Granted, appearances tend to obfuscate this fact, driving as I do a mass-market Japanese sedan and living in a modest home.

But it's true.

And sports fan, you do, too.

As you swallow those thirty-dollar parking fees and twenty-dollar hamburgers and an ever-spiraling cable bill, remember Alex Rodriguez. David Price. And Giancarlo Stanton. Clayton Kershaw. Zack Greinke. And Max Scherzer.

Someone's paying those salaries, and it ain't the boss. (Which is, incidentally, how rich guys get rich in the first place.)

While the players receive the brunt of our derision when discord rears its ugly head, we shouldn't forget those who entitle the young men we call professional athletes.

Once upon a time, professional athletes were very underpaid. But that argument is as relevant as the pony express is to communications. A middling ballplayer like Edwin Jackson (who couldn't hold Jose Quintana's glove, much less Clayton Kershaw's) has earned sixty-six million-dollars playing ball.

Edwin Jackson. Think about that.

When you or I perform our jobs in kind, we usually find ourselves in the bosses office being educated in the finer points of our employer's performance plans. (This if we're not being made available to our respective industries, as a favorite euphemism goes.)

Major-league baseball is a TV show. It's a consumer product—just like laundry detergent and tires and those packs of underwear at Walmart.

If I may be so bold, I'd like to suggest that MLB owners and players think really hard about market saturation and price points. About the fiscal limits those of us in the ninety-nine percent have for non-essential consumables.

Is it understood by owners and players that there are not nearly enough people in the one-percent to support thirty professional baseball teams? Or thirty NBA squads? Ditto our thirty-two NFL franchises. And the thirty-one NHL aggregations we share with Canada.

I'm happy for Manny Machado. Seriously. Hell, if someone's going press three-hundred million-dollars (guaranteed) into your hand you'd be a fool not to take it.

But as a sports fan whose access decreases with every bump in a player's salary, I'm forced to relegate my fandom to the same category as my crush on Melanie Liburd and follow from a distance.

The players can strike and the owners can incinerate their fortunes on long-term, nine-figure contracts and hawk their over-priced merch until the future is female. But even as an ardent, lifelong music fan who reveled in the joy of attending concerts, I learned to live without them when their cost exceeded their benefit.

I can do the same with professional sports. And suspect I'm not alone.

Huh?

When it's not baseball season, the Chicago Bulls are my favorite team. I have lived and died with them repeatedly. The way all fans do.

Dating back to the days of Walker, Boerwinkle, Love, Van Lier and Sloan, I have relished their traditional emphasis on defense and was thrilled to see it resurrected twenty years later, headed by some kid from North Carolina whose name escapes me at present.

Another twenty years later, hope again spiraled out of control when a young nucleus of Luol Deng, Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah produced the NBA's best record over the course of the 2010/11 season. 

It was hard to believe the glory days weren't back.

Of course, the season's first three and four-game losing streaks in the midst of the Eastern Conference Finals put an end to that. Add a career-altering knee injury to Rose one year later, and the glory days were something for other people to enjoy.

In other words, the ephemeral and capricious nature of championships had become startlingly and painfully clear.

With that team now scattered to the four winds, the rebuilding has begun anew—kind of.

With a stated goal of becoming younger and more athletic, the Bulls used this year's first-round draft pick on Denzel Valentine, a talented and promising guard from Michigan State.

Check.

Then free-agency opened. You should know the Bulls have done notoriously poorly for a team of their renown, with just Carlos Boozer and Pau Gasol to show for their extracurricular wooing.

Until this year.

The Bulls have evidently changed course and decided they're a team on the cusp of a championship. In one week, they have successfully pursued (and signed) thirty-year-old Rajon Rondo and thirty-four year-old Dwyane Wade.

Now, Mr. Wade is a player as talented as his name is misspelled. A sure-fire Hall of Famer. The winner of three NBA championships. The lineage is faultless.

Mr. Rondo is also highly regarded, named to numerous all-star teams and the winner of an NBA championship with the vaunted Boston Celtics. He is a triple-double waiting to happen.

Either could be the tipping point that pushes a team on the verge into serious contention.

But the Bulls aren't. In the words of GM Gar Forman, they're retooling. Getting younger. More athletic. Aren't they? 

It's hard to see how the additions of two guards in their thirties constitutes a youth movement, unless we're competing in an over-fifty league at the YMCA.

The glut at guard is unfathomable. Do the Bulls have a secret? Are they going to trade Jimmy Butler? Move him to small forward?

Who knows.

It's hard to admit The Man matters. But he does. Look at the Cubs under the custody of Tom Ricketts and Theo Epstein. I can only hope the Bulls' brain trust of John Paxson and Gar Forman knows what the hell they're doing.

Jerry Reinsdorf obviously does.

But as the folk who let Deng, Gasol and Noah walk away virtually scot-free, and who replaced one of the league's premier coaches with an untested—but servile—lapcat, you have ample reason to wonder.

And I do.