San Francisco Giants

The Giants had Aaron Judge for seven minutes and Carlos Correa for seven days.

Both will play in New York next season.

Yes, the Giants were set to sign “Arson Judge” — their top free agent target and a Northern California native — according to a tweet from MLB news breaker Jon Heyman earlier this month. That tweet was quickly debunked and deleted, and Judge returned to the Yankees.

But then Correa agreed to the largest contract in club history last week. The Giants had pivoted and landed the superstar player the team desperately needed.

Only Correa never signed the contract.

The Giants were set to announce the shortstop’s arrival in San Francisco Tuesday. Instead, three hours before that celebratory press conference, the team “postponed” it without explanation. The Associated Press reported that the team was concerned about something found during Correa’s physical.

Perhaps the physical found something serious.

The Mets don’t seem to care about it.

Correa backed out of his Giants agreement and struck a new one with the New York Mets overnight, worth roughly the same amount annually as the Giants’ deal.

My official diagnosis: cold feet.

(Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images) 

There is a world where the Giants dodged not one but two bullets by missing out on Judge and now Correa.

That world will not come into focus for several years, yet.

The world we live in now is one of complete, abject embarrassment for the Giants.

There was a good way for this offseason to go. There was a bad way, too. Then there was this way, which is the bad way covered in a metric ton of excrement.

Weird things happen in baseball all the time, but this saga is unique, and that’s what makes it so disastrous for the Giants.

They’re an organization that was looking to prove it was big-time this winter, only to be big-timed in an almost unimaginable way.

(AP Photo/David J. Phillip) 

Giants fans should be angry. They deserve a full explanation for why the team was unable to get Correa to sign on the dotted line.

It’s time to violate some HIPAA laws: What body parts were in question and what was wrong with them? Why wasn’t Correa wearing a No. 1 jersey over a dress shirt and tie on Tuesday?

I’d say fans deserve an explanation from Correa, too, but who cares what he says?

And until the team provides an outstanding excuse — and one might not exist — this is a failure of the highest order for the Giants.

It’d be one thing to miss out on both free agents. It’s a whole other thing to agree to terms with one, to have that agreement last for a week, and then for that player to back out of it at the last minute for reasons that seem flimsy at best.

No one likes a tease.

But the Giants look like a mark.

(Photo by David Berding/Getty Images) 

The worst part of it all: Because it took a week for the deal to fall through, there’s no recourse for the Giants. Correa was the second option behind Judge. There is no third option the team can attack now that the Correa deal has fallen through.

They can’t even amalgamate his production with second-tier free agents. They’re all gone, too.

So now the Giants have no chance to do anything important in 2023 because they were unable to add anyone significant to the roster this offseason.

They’re basically right back where they started. In third place in the National League West — at best.

Only now fans have two new mortal enemies:

Correa, obviously, and the Giants’ brass, too.

Sports columnist Dieter Kurtenbach analyzes the amazing and roasts the absurd in the world of sports for the Bay Area News Group. He was previously a national sports columnist for Fox Sports and a staff writer at the South Florida Sun Sentinel. He can also be heard on KNBR (104.5-FM, 680-AM).