The Twins Failed Correa More Than Correa Failed the Twins

At the end of the day, Carlos Correa was right. After signing on with the Minnesota Twins for a year, it took an extraordinary set of circumstances to get him to re-up in Minnesota after hitting free agency. First, he signed a huge deal with the San Francisco Giants, which they promptly voided. Then, the New York Mets tried to use the situation to squeeze Correa into an absurdly team-friendly deal.

Correa went back to the Twins on a six-year, $200 million deal that signaled the team was making its first major commitment to winning. Any doubts that it was a new day were dispelled by Minnesota's first playoff series win in two decades, thanks in large part to Correa's savvy.

Everyone knows what happened next. The Twins' TV money vanished. While the Giants and Mets have been able to maintain high payrolls in a streaming world, Minnesota clearly couldn't. The commitment to winning turned into a second Terry Ryan Era of penny-pinching. Correa saw that, clearly wanted out, so he's off to the Houston Astros and their $200 million payroll.

It's easy to look at what Correa did this year and say that he didn't hold up his part of the bargain. Fangraphs has his WAR at 1.1, and Baseball-Reference is even lower on him, pegging his contributions at 0.1, almost exactly replacement-level. His defense went from elite last year to merely average this season. Despite his clutch reputation, Correa also sported the team's worst Win Probability Added (minus-1.93) among position players, and it wasn't particularly close. In fact, he's the ninth-worst in the majors among qualified hitters.

Twins fans might be justified in saying, Good riddance, enjoy your 30s in Houston.

But here's the thing: This isn't what Correa signed up for.

This week's dramatic and sudden hollowing out of Minnesota's roster was inevitable, but it has been heading in this direction since the end of 2023. Shedding important contributors like Sonny Gray, Carlos Santana, and Michael A. Taylor without any viable replacement was a signal that winning wasn't a priority. This trade deadline was essentially the front office acknowledging that trying to stay afloat amidst budget cuts was untenable.

Did the Twins get some bad breaks this season? Sure. Pablo López and Bailey Ober getting hurt was a blow. So were Royce Lewis, Matt Wallner, Trevor Larnach, and Edouard Julien having different degrees of disappointing seasons. However, every team has similar experiences. The good teams can withstand those hits, whether by having major-league-ready talent on hand or by signing dependable veterans who can step into an everyday role.

If Minnesota had one more Chris Paddack-type innings-eater -- not even a Sonny Gray! -- the team wouldn't have needed to lean so heavily on young starters who (predictably) struggle to get through five innings. An extra $10 million might have been able to bring in some credible infielders to stabilize things when players like Lewis and Julien struggled.

The Twins didn't need much. They had Buxton and Correa up the middle. They had a strong pitching staff and a dominant bullpen. But they couldn't get anything worthwhile on the margins.

Sure, Correa isn't blameless for the team's position in the standings. If he were making an MVP-type impact -- one closer to 4-5 WAR instead of 0-1 -- they'd have hit the deadline with a 55-53 record. Sure, it wouldn't have been great, but two games back of a Wild Card spot would've stopped this sell-off from happening, at least theoretically.

But that wasn't the deal in 2023. Correa wasn't supposed to require another MVP on the squad to barely drag the Twins into Wild Card contention. He was supposed to be the missing piece for a team that was always on the fringe of playoff contention without ever being a threat. The star shortstop held up his end of the bargain from that standpoint, slashing .409/.458/.545 in his playoff run with the Twins, his usual postseason level of clutch. All on one good foot, no less.

It could have been the starting point for Minnesota's rise to become a legitimate contender. Instead, the team couldn't even bother to act like a legit baseball team for the next few months. All that momentum... wasted. It wasn't just Twins fans that got the rug pulled from under them; it was pulled from under Correa, too. Who wouldn't want out after that?

Ultimately, the Pohlads failed Correa in a way that might be difficult for the franchise to recover from. Minnesota was already Correa's third choice before all this happened. Unless new ownership (whenever that arrives) can make these types of commitments to winning and stand by them, why would any potential free agent trust Minnesota not to do the same thing to them as they just did to Correa?

Perhaps that outlook will change soon, but for now, Twins fans are facing a bleak future.