Well this isn’t a great start to the Carlos Correa era in San Francisco. In fact, now we’re not even sure there’s going to be a Carlos Correa era in San Francisco.
The San Francisco Giants canceled all of Tuesday’s festivities, which were supposed to include Correa’s introductory press conference at Oracle Park to officially announce the record setting 13-year, $325 million deal with the shortstop. Reportedly, the last second cancelation was due to something that was discovered during Correa’s physical, which took place on Monday.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the Giants still have not made any sort of announcement as to what is next regarding the Correa situation. Ron Blum of the Associated Press was the first to report that a medical issue was the hang up, and he joined Tolbert & Copes on Tuesday to explain what he’s heard is going on and what it all means.
“There’s just some hang up over the physical and we’ll just have to see how that plays out,” Blum said on KNBR. “Whether that holds up the deal for a significant amount of time, whether whatever the issue is they incorporate it somehow into the guarantee language in the contract and go through with it, it’s just too early to tell which way this is going to go.
“Of what 400-500 contracts in an offseason there’s probably medical issues in a handful of them. It’s not surprising. It is surprising that the news conference was announced before the medical stuff had been cleared. But remember baseball teams are large organizations and the medical people report to the baseball operations people, and probably somewhere between the baseball operations staff and the communications staff, to go-ahead was given before the medical people gave the go-ahead to the baseball ops people.”
Blum says it’s not that uncommon for different medical staffs to have differing opinions on a player. That would explain why Correa’s end-of-season physical with the Twins didn’t reveal what the Giants apparently found. He also said that the issue could not be PED related, because teams don’t get involved with PED tests during physicals.
“There’s definitely differing opinions,” Blum said. “It depends on team’s medical staffs, a lot of the time it depends on the relationship of the medical staffs and the baseball operations heads. Because the last thing the medical people want to do is clear something and have it come back to bite them six months or 18 months later. It’s always different. Some teams will green light the same scan that other teams would red flag.”
So now the $1 million question: What happens now? Is this deal really going to fall through? Will Correa’s agent Scott Boras start negotiating with other teams? Blum believes we are far from either of those things happening, and that both sides will pursue a path of least resistance.
“In most cases in a situation like this, the [agent] and team would work together to get past the issue,” Blum said. “He wouldn’t go out and open up the marketplace again, absent exhausting trying to resolve this.
“If the Giants are worried about guaranteeing 13 years, they could put in something where perhaps the guarantee is conditioned on ‘x medically.’ Or you could have a re-opener if ‘x happens’. But you can put in these conditions that work through an issue that’s of concern.”
Blum says history would show that a deal like this falling through is remote.
“Only one out of every five-10 years falls apart.”
Let’s hope he’s right.
Listen to the full interview below. You can listen to every KNBR interview on our podcast page at knbr.com/podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Catch Tolbert & Copes weekdays from 2 – 6 p.m. on KNBR 104.5 / 680 and streaming live on KNBR.com.