What's the price of hope? In losing Carlos Correa, Giants defaulted on years of big promises

If anyone is familiar with both the power and peril of hype in the 2020s, you’d think it would be denizens of the San Francisco metro area. If a couple of decades of Silicon Valley’s travails have proven anything, it’s that the right person making the right promise with the right presentation can get you a long way.

Or, at least, can give you a long way to fall.

On Wednesday morning, San Francisco Giants fans fell from record heights when mysterious concerns about a physical reportedly held up a deal with franchise shortstop Carlos Correa and led him to subsequently agree to a smaller offer from the New York Mets.

This winter was supposed to herald the beginning of Giants 2.0, the payoff for years of waiver claims and veteran holdovers. It was supposed to arrive in grand fashion, in something like the news conference that was scheduled for Tuesday morning.

There was good reason to believe in Giants 2.0. Fans understandably buy (bought?) the genius of Farhan Zaidi, the president of baseball operations hired in November 2018 after he helped build the Los Angeles Dodgers behemoth. They came to see the vision of Zaidi's patient plan (Codename: Wait for it): Build up a farm system without tanking, let the bevy of post-World Series contracts run out and then complement a young core with splash signings funded by Charles B. Johnson's ownership group.

Fans truly believed in the possibilities once the 2021 team conjured a 107-win season and an unlikely division title. But as much fun as it was to win as David, this is a major franchise in a major city, literally called the Giants. They are supposed to be Goliaths.

Well aware of what everyone else could see — heading into this offseason, the team had less than $21 million committed to player payroll for 2024 and beyond — Zaidi himself gave full voice to the hype, telling MLB Network Radio “everything is on the table” for the Giants, “including going out and being aggressive at the top end of the free-agent market.”

After the Giants briefly and erroneously appeared to be on the verge of landing Aaron "Arson" Judge, the disappointment rose from the fog of Twitter but was tough to pin on the Giants front office. Then Correa reportedly agreed to a 13-year, $350 million deal, and there was much rejoicing — until the Giants found something they questioned in Correa's physical.

We don't yet have the Giants' side of the story as to what happened between their calling off Tuesday's scheduled introduction and the early hours of Wednesday morning, when Correa reportedly agreed to a 12-year, $315 million pact with the New York Mets. We are currently relying on what agent Scott Boras said happened, which is simple if perplexing: The Giants raised concerns about an old injury that hasn't been problematic in Correa's major-league career so far, delayed officially signing the deal, and remained unwilling to sign the deal when Boras indicated he was going to reopen discussions with other teams.

Zaidi put out a statement that doesn’t refute any of that, saying, “While we are prohibited from disclosing confidential medical information, as Scott Boras stated publicly, there was a difference of opinion over the results of Carlos’ physical examination. We wish Carlos the best.”

To earn any level of confidence going forward, the Giants front office will need to provide some answers about what transpired over the past 48 hours.

The best guess floated by multiple plugged-in reporters involves a broken leg Correa suffered in the minor leagues in 2014. Was that injury, which has never recurred in the majors, actually the issue? Is there some degenerative condition that would affect a long-term deal that didn’t raise alarms for, say, the Minnesota Twins when they signed Correa less than a year ago? Was the issue so significant that it warranted risking losing Correa entirely? Is all of this worth whatever dollar figure might’ve been shaved off the deal in renegotiating it? And did ownership or baseball operations ultimately hold things up?

Remember, the Giants’ 40-man payroll currently ranks 17th in baseball, behind that of the Colorado Rockies. The plan, it seemed to this point, was to thin out the payroll, then bulk up with big names. But impatience was building during the aging Giants’ return to earth in 2022.

Addressing the club’s dearth of superstar talent last summer, as the Dodgers flourished with Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman and the Padres traded for Juan Soto, Zaidi breezed through a standard mention of the importance of homegrown talent, paying lip service to Brandon Crawford, Brandon Belt and Buster Posey. He understood the missing piece, though, however he wanted to go about getting it.

"This notion of, hey, you want a young fan of yours to be able to go to the team store and buy a jersey and know that they can go to the park wearing that jersey for the next several years and feel like that's their guy," Zaidi told NBC Sports. "I think there's a lot to that."

Correa represented that in a way no one who was a veteran on the 2014 Giants World Series roster can in the waning days of 2022. And the Giants let him go over an issue that has not yet been explained. At a moment when they knew there were no more ticket-selling, jersey-printing talents left on the market.

Unlike stakeholders in your favorite start-up-turned-true crime-saga, Giants fans were not actually defrauded, in a technical sense, by this development (though, to be fair, a custom No. 1 Correa jersey ordered from the team store is a more tangible product than anything a crypto firm has ever sold). But even if there is some glaring issue in Correa's medicals, the emotional investment sunk into waiting on Zaidi's Giants suddenly feels impossible to recoup.

There are no headliner free agents left this offseason. The Giants' much-anticipated offseason bounty will be headlined by No. 3 starters and Mitch Haniger, an oft-injured outfielder now forced into a leading role when he signed on to play scene-stealer. San Francisco's current roster has zero position players projected to be worth even 3 WAR in 2023, per FanGraphs. And neither this episode nor the likely mediocrity of the upcoming season is going to be a point in the Giants' favor if they plan to duel the Dodgers, Mets and whomever else for Shohei Ohtani next winter.

The Giants have been selling a bright future for years. Even if they thought they were buying damaged goods in Correa, it seems like it would’ve been the better move to keep the hype alive.