It could happen!
Right-handed pitcher Corbin Burnes is about to make an absurd amount of money. We knew he was due a big payday, and then Max Fried went and signed an eight-year, $218 million deal, pushing the market significantly higher than what we initially thought. Burnes — and Scott Boras — are salivating.
When the offseason began, I didn’t think there was any chance the Giants would sign Burnes — it’s just not an organization that makes that sort of investment in pitchers (save for the youngsters of the world, like Yoshinobu Yamamoto), and there was no reason to think that was changing with Buster Posey at the helm. So if you’d told me a month ago that the Giants would sign Burnes, I’d have been shocked.
And that was before Burnes’ price grew, and the Giants handed out a franchise-record deal to his former teammate Willy Adames. Those things should have taken the extreme improbability of signing Burnes and turned it into an impossibility.
Yet the opposite seems to have happened. It seems the Giants signing Burnes is a distinct possibility.
We heard rumors and reports following the Adames signing that the Giants were still interested in Burnes, but those rumblings were taken up a notch on Wednesday by none other than trusted insider Alex Pavlovic of NBC Sports Bay Area. Pavlovic wrote Wednesday night that the Giants are viewed by MLB executives as the co-favorites to land Burnes, who grew up in California and played collegiately at St. Mary’s in Moraga. The Toronto Blue Jays are considered the other favorite, with the Boston Red Sox also heavily involved, despite just trading for Garrett Crochet.
Pavs’ report is littered with encouraging anecdotes, like “Burnes expressed interest to some Giants in wearing orange and black even before free agency heated up” and “Sources familiar with the pursuit were cautiously optimistic Wednesday.” Perhaps most exciting though, is this nugget from Pavlovic: “the new regime already has convinced ownership to spend more this offseason than was previously planned.”
As the clear-cut best remaining free agent, and the only frontline starter still unsigned (save for Rōki Sasaki), Burnes is expected to sign in the coming days. In the meantime, the Giants will have a press conference at Oracle Park this morning to introduce Adames … and maybe they’ll start planning another one while they’re there.
How many days until Opening Day?
105 days until a Giants team that hopefully has Burnes and Sasaki on it plays meaningful baseball.