Marty Lurie isn’t buying what the Giants are selling.
The long-time Giants radio personality explained on KNBR Wednesday that the notion San Francisco halted the 13-year, $350 million deal because of a disagreement on his health, doesn’t make sense. He said that even if that is the case, it points to incompetence and inexperience from the front office.
“Rookie mistakes. This is their first time in the deep end of the pool and things got away from them,” Lurie said with Papa & Lund on Wednesday. “The biggest mistake was scheduling the press conference and making this a public issue, instead of something that should have been a private issue, and then we wouldn’t have this last 24 hours of disappointment and everything else.
“They wanted Correa all along. He was their guy, they targeted him. So to say they didn’t have his medical records, they didn’t know, all this kind of stuff, I don’t believe it at all. He was a free agent last year. His records are available. They are his records. All you have to do is say ‘look, before we make this deal for $350 million, we wanna see all the medical records.’ And if they didn’t do that, then again it’s a rookie mistake and they didn’t do their due diligence in looking at his background.”
Lurie said the fact that the Giants haven’t told their side of the story beyond a two-sentence statement is compounding the problem. It would be in their best interest to leak what ultimately caused them to back out, especially with Correa’s agent Scott Boras telling everybody that the Giants were worried about a pre-MLB injury issue, and that they ghosted his client.
“We don’t know what the Giants saw or didn’t see,” Lurie continued. “And it’s amazing to me that this has not leaked out somewhere. Boras is talking, giving his twist on everything, but we don’t know anything at all from the Giants. To me, silence is deafening on that one.
“The point is, who approves the press conference? Baseball operations. Matt Chisholm [head of Giants public relations] is not calling a press conference on his own. Baseball operations has got to say ‘Okay, this is what’s going down and we’re going to do this tomorrow. It’s Christmas time and we want to get him out of town and get this done, so let’s announce it.’ Well, that was not the way to do it, especially if you think you’re bringing someone in with this history of 2019 and back issues and things like that. It’s got to take you more than a day for your doctors to look at him and get the images and all that. So they pushed it and I think they pushed it too quickly.”
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 Papa & Lund weekdays from 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. on KNBR 104.5 / 680 and streaming live on KNBR.com.