By now, you know that the San Francisco Giants missed out on bringing in a franchise cornerstone in shortstop Carlos Correa. Correa was all set to be introduced as a Giant when — HEY PRESTO! — the team decided that his cursory physical was simply too concerning for it to actually sign him. Whether the Giants had actual misgivings about Correa’s health (the physical reportedly disclosed an 8-year-old injury that the shortstop had already long played through) or team owner Charles Johnson prefers spending the bulk of his money on his favorite political platforms from the 1920s , I can’t say for sure. What I can say with 100% certainty is that the New York Mets took advantage of poor Chuck’s dillydallying to swoop in and claim Correa for themselves. San Francisco, you got yoinked. You got yoinked real bad.
Under normal circumstances, this would be a situation where the greater baseball world would join Bay Area fans in crushing the Giants for dragging their feet and blowing their shot at a perennial All-Star and world champion. But this is Major League Baseball, where spending profligately is a greater sin than losing 100 games a year. What should be LOL Giants is instead a display of the sport’s reddest assets.
“Our sport feels broken now,” an anonymous executive told Evan Drellich of the Athletic. “We’ve got somebody with three times the median payroll and has no care whatsoever for the long-term of any of these contracts, in terms of the risk associated with any of them. How exactly does this work? I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it.”
Drellich’s story illustrated the genuinely remarkable backlash that the Mets — the New York Mets! The most godforsaken baseball team in the goddamn universe! — are facing after having the gall to actually try to win baseball games. And Drellich heard the same thing from another rival executive who got his juiced balls in a knot over this heist. Because you see, it’s not that Mets owner Steve Cohen is spending money; it’s that he broke an omerta among MLB ownership that’s been evident for many years now.
“I think it’s going to have consequences for him down the road,” another exec told Drellich. “There’s no collusion. But… there was a reason nobody for years ever went past $300 million. You still have partners, and there’s a system.”
There’s a system, OK? There are rules if you wanna be part of this club, and the No. 1 rule is “we do collusion but only talk about it in pig Latin.”
Cohen, who is the richest owner in MLB, had no use for this particular unwritten rule of baseball, because why would he? You buy your hometown team; you try to win a title with it. That’s the dream. That’s all that matters. To that end, Cohen asserted his perfectly legal, collectively bargained right to snatch away a kick-ass shortstop from San Francisco at the last second. If this were any other sport, in any other league, no one would be angry at the Mets right now. Everyone would be mad at the Giants for being cheap and stupid. The Mets are trying to win, and we Americans take our winning seriously. So it’s jarring to not just hear anonymous MLB execs crying in their beers over this but to hear it from MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, who is forever on the hunt for reasons to despise the very sport he’s been entrusted with.
“I think everyone in this room understands that we have a level of revenue disparity in this sport that makes it impossible for some of our markets to compete at some of the numbers we’ve seen,” Commissioner Manfred said at the winter meetings. “And, you know, that’s not a positive.”
THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED, YOU ASSHOLE! You wanted a system where a sizable number of teams can’t compete because, in terms of revenue, they simply don’t have to. You wanted a hush-hush salary cap, and you trusted a cadre of billionaires, the least trustworthy people on Earth, to abide by it. You wanted MLB to operate like the world’s most craven private equity firm, and your newest championship team just fired its own general manager in an effort to fit that mold, citing the “efficiency and ruthlessness” he desired.
You wanted all this, and you have it balls to tell me it’s making you sad? You scum. You pasty, needy little hobgoblin. Someone should steal your wife from you. I am long used to American sports leagues operating on a level of cynicism that makes Bill Maher look like Mister f—king Rogers. None of that is new. But what pisses me off about the Correa affair isn’t baseball’s internal response to it, nor even Manfred’s. It’s that they’ve conditioned fans to adopt this warped mindset as well. That’s how we’ve ended up with former Obama adviser David Axelrod acting as if the Mets — who, again, are the Mets — are the meanest bully in the school cafeteria. And it’s why I’ve seen otherwise normal fans and media people express sticker shock at the Mets’ shiny new payroll.
You don’t have to be like this. You shouldn’t be like this. You don’t own a baseball team. None of this is your money. You don’t lose a cent when Steve Cohen decides to clean out Boras’ Sporting Goods Store right before Christmas. You’re not gonna get fired from your job at the cracker factory because those damn MLB salaries are just too high now. The only thing that you, as a fan, have to care about is whether your team is good. Thanks to new arrivals Correa and Cy Young winner Justin Verlander, the Mets are quite good. The Giants, who are in possession of neither of those players, are probably going to be significantly worse. That’s all you need to know. That’s all you should care about: winning. If your team isn’t interested in winning, then the last thing you should do is throw your loaded diaper at teams that are. You should blame your own team for its parsimoniousness, and then you should take to the streets and burn the whole thing down.
But thanks to Manfred and his goons, instead what I get is this curiously passive resistance to baseball players getting their fair share. Free agency came to baseball 46 years ago. Curt Flood sacrificed the rest of his baseball career to help make it a reality. None of this should be new to you, nor shocking, nor bad. This is the way baseball should operate, and the way it did operate before MLB owners decided to institute a shadow salary cap on the sly. So when the Mets spend a lot of money, and someone inside baseball tells you that their precious sport is “broken,” ask yourself what it is, exactly, that baseball would prefer to remain intact.