As the pursuit of top free agent starting pitcher Corbin Burnes There haven’t really been any new developments about Burnes since ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported last week that the negotiations were likely to go past Christmas, but longtime Bay Area baseball reporter Susan Slusser added some new info for Giants fans to ponder in the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday. (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms.)
“According to an industry source, the issue is whether Giants ownership wants to push the payroll above $200 million again after doing so only to finish fourth in the NL West last season,” Slusser wrote.
As Burnes’ market has been in a holding pattern, other pitchers have quickly been snatched across baseball. Just this week, left-hander Sean Manaea signed with the Mets and Walker Buehler landed with the Red Sox. The Giants are starting to run out of potential fallback options if Burnes signs elsewhere, and Max Fried’s market-setting eight-year, $218 million deal with the Yankees is pushing the cost of a Burnes deal way up.
Giants fans entered the offseason with low expectations for new front office head Buster Posey, who took over after the team fired Farhan Zaidi. Posey made it clear that he wanted to get a top shortstop and then went out and did just that, signing Willy Adames to the largest deal in franchise history.
But Posey’s words on the pitching front have been far less direct. He had been mostly hyping up the Giants’ young pitchers before and during the Winter Meetings. Even as reports continued to swell about San Francisco’s interest in Burnes and fan expectations rose, Posey attempted to downplay the urgency to land Burnes.
All of the Burnes interest has been placed against a November report from the Athletic’s longtime Giants beat writer Andrew Baggarly that the Giants were planning to reduce payroll in 2024. Baggarly has since written that the organization would reassess this reported plan if they could land Burnes.
But the biggest question left among the fan base for chairman Greg Johnson, Posey and the rest of Giants ownership is how willing the Giants are to shed their “somewhat break even” ways and spend what it takes to land the top players.
