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.

Paying the Bryce

Washington Nationals outfielder Bryce Harper has let it slip he's seeking a ten-year contract for 400 million-dollars.

In a coincidence that is beyond remarkable, so am I. Of course, rain that gets hurt while falling is more likely than yours truly ever seeing such a thing.

Bryce, on the other hand, is another story.

The precious millennial, known for wearing a hat with 'Let's make baseball fun again' embroidered across the front and for telling a grizzled sportswriter “That's a clown question, dude”, is a good-but-not-great player.Yet in our culture of microwave celebrity, he is considered a brilliant one.

He did stitch together a nice 2015, for which he was immediately awarded the National League's Most Valuable Player trophy. But aside from that single season, his play has yet to spark even a single rumor that Babe Ruth has returned from the dead and is inhabiting a Washington Nationals uniform.

Maybe Bryce is just having one on us. Using Harper-speak to get us to lighten up. And if so, good for him. Few things in life are reported with the grim severity as the unmet needs of a professional athlete with an expiring contract.

On the other hand, maybe Harper is outrageously-coddled. Maybe he is someone who's never held down an after-school job, much less a Monday through Friday one. Maybe he's been given a pass from the demands and expectations of the maturation curve because he could hit a baseball. 

Add to this equation that his agent is Scott Boras, one held in contempt by more than a few baseball GMs for his fuck-your-team-I-play-for-my-client mentality, and things take a decidedly darker turn.

Forty-million dollars per for a guy who's never driven in a-hundred runs, never lined two-hundred hits, never won a batting title, finished one season with a slugging percentage over five-hundred and can claim but a single post-season performance that wasn't a disappointment?

The guy who finished in the top ten in his league's WAR exactly once (there's that word again) should be the highest-paid player in baseball? Based on what? All of this factors into the Nationals' failure to advance beyond the opening round of the playoffs even once in three tries.

At his peak in 1930, Babe Ruth earned 80,000 dollars a year. Adjusted for inflation, that equals 1.1 million bucks a year in 2016 dollars. Any idea—any idea at all—why someone named Bryce Harper is worth forty times that?

Me, neither.