Wednesday Bantering: Correa signs with Mets?

Four days until Christmas. Or for me, time to start thinking about getting my Christmas presents bought.

When I went to bed last night, Carlos Correa’s deal with the Giants had hit a hold-up because of something in his physical. It didn’t sound overly serious. There are often things that come up in the physicals that teams have to think about for a moment.

But, when I got up this morning, Correa is a Met. He signed for 12 years and $315 million. That’s one year and $35 million less than he was to get from the Giants, and it is still pending a physical (but I’d imagine there won’t be much trouble there.

The Mets have Francisco Lindor at short, with a $300 million contract of his own. Apparently, Correa is willing to move to third base (a Jeter/ARod thing). The Mets have spent over $800 million on free agents this winter. Their payroll with be in the $380 million range, so they will have a large competitive balance tax (over $100 million). Next time you hear that baseball is dying, cite this.

I can’t imagine what Giants fans are thinking. I guess I’ll go check out Grant Brisbee’s Twitter.

A story I haven’t been following since I live a little ways from Toronto is the ActiveTO saga which Mark Shapiro was against.

Mark sent the Toronto city council a letter saying it would make it hard for Jays fans to get to Rogers Centre. Apparently, he felt that closing Lake Shore Boulevard to cars would hurt attendance at Jays' games.

Mark has since said he wasn’t against the plan, but that seems to be a lie. Also, claims that it affected attendance at the Jays’ games is a lie.

Now a report finds that Shiparo didn’t actually ‘write’ the letter. He copied something that ‘former city councilman’ Frank Grimes wrote for him. I don’t know enough about City of Toronto politics to know who he is, but he had ethics issues because of close relationships with developers in the city.

There is a report by the Office of the Integrity Commissioner which points out that Mayor John Tory has a ‘pecuniary interest’ (a term I have to look up, “relating to money”) in the Blue Jays, which might suggests that a letter from Mark Shiparo would be of particular interest to Tory.

As I said, I don’t know enough about it all to have an opinion. I like that cities are opening up more ways for people riding bikes to get around. It seems a good move to me. I know too, that some folks just hate the idea of opening more avenues for bikers to get around, feeling threatened by it in some way.

I hope some reporter questions Shiparo on this and see why he just copied something from someone else and put his name on it. It feels wrong to me that he did this.

There is a Twitter thread here, it goes on for several tweets:

The Yankees have named Aaron Judge ‘captain’, which gives him the power to talk to on-ice officials or something.

Baseball owners are poor.....