The Curious Case of Carlos Correa and Sports Safetyism

As a Yankee fan I should be happy to see the Mets’ deal with free agent shortstop Carlos Correa fall through after a doctor raised concerns about an eight-year-old ankle injury that has caused him no problems since then. This was the same doctor, it now turns out, whose opinion the San Francisco Giants had relied on in pulling out of an earlier deal with Correa. Despite being aware of that opinion Mets owner Steve Cohen had “swooped in” just a few hours later to announce that the Mets would nonetheless sign a similar deal with Correa.

It’s hard to be too happy about this turn of events, though, because this whole absurd story taps disturbing social trends that go beyond baseball. As Correa notes, he’s “played at an elite level” in the majors for the eight years since his injury and has not missed a single day due to it or needed any treatment for it.

“We did have other ankle specialists look at it and say it was going to be fine, orthopedists who know me, even the one who did the surgery on me,” Correa told [The Athletic]. They were looking at the functionality of the ankle, the way the ankle has been the past eight years … where my movement has never been compromised.”

He added: “The one doctor that had never touched me or seen me … was the one who said it wasn’t going to be fine.”

Yet the Mets, like the Giants, ignored Correa’s observed condition and performance history and instead deferred to the most hyper-cautious predictions.

I’m sensitive to this because I’m one of those people (at least I hope I’m not the only one) who, despite feeling healthy and being very physically active with no ill effects, basically tests out as “dead” on any medical exam I take. For example, I’m diagnosed as having “severe asthma” even though I’ve never had an asthma attack or trouble breathing, or even wheezed. I won’t even mention the various asymptomatic alleged heart syndromes. I broke my leg as a kid and, like Correa, haven’t had any pain or weakness from it since then. But, based on my other medical experiences, I’m pretty sure that if I had an orthopedic workup I’d be told I should be in a wheelchair.

So I’m very concerned about medical “false alarms” that, to take one example, screen healthy young athletes out of sports due to benign heart abnormalities – leading, ironically, to “obesity, … diabetes, and lifestyle-related heart disease later in life” and even turning them into “‘cardiac cripples’ … afraid to be active, or even walk up flights of stairs, for fear of dropping dead.”

But isn’t the scuttling of the 12-year, $315 million Correa deal different? He isn’t being barred from the sport he loves, just paid a lot less (though still an enormous amount) for it in his new contract with the Minnesota Twins. Wasn’t reneging on their more lucrative offer just a hardheaded business decision by the Mets? As a friend says, “an investment like that requires certainty.” He’s not wrong on the economics: the breathtakingly high salaries and the trend towards long-term contracts in professional sports, even for a player like Correa who is a star but hardly a superstar, understandably contribute to risk aversion on the part of the owners.

But I don't think that economics is the only thing at play here. There’s a separate cultural factor heightening this risk avoidance: what Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in their book The Coddling of the American Mind termed “safetyism” – a “belief system in which safety has become a sacred value” and “people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns” – and it has grown as exponentially in society as those nine-figure contracts have in sports over the last few decades. So “experts” now counsel parents that children shouldn’t cross the street until they’re 14. And, as Heather Mac Donald has documented, safetyist panic has deranged both the Masked Left and the Antivax Right in the Covid era.        

Both the safetyist ethos “that no one must ever get hurt,” and the huge sums at stake if one of their players does, incline owners to extreme risk avoidance in a case like Correa’s. But the problem with my friend’s formulation that “an investment like that requires certainty” is that one can never achieve certainty – i.e., the elimination of risk – whether it’s “zero Covid,” or safeguarding children from all harm, or preventing injury or reinjury, or the risk of sudden death from unseen heart syndromes, in athletes.

Before the age of safetyism we understood this, in the sports world as well as in broader society. In assessing the risk of reinjury to an athlete this meant taking Correa’s common sense view and looking to the athlete’s post-injury health, not to the worst-case scenarios of hypochondriacal doctors and cover-your-rear lawyers and accountants. We also let children walk to school by themselves and didn’t lock down the country because of a virus.

This pre-safetyist attitude was reflected by the doctor who told me the test said I had severe asthma but then said “I treat patients, not charts.” Steve Cohen must have had this same instinctive common sense when he committed to doing a deal with Correa even though he knew that the chart wasn’t going to look good. But then he didn’t have the courage of his convictions. The result is he looks like a fool, and it will serve him right when the Mets finish ten games behind the Braves while the Twins with Correa ... challenge the Yankees all the way to Game 7 of the ALCS.

Dennis Saffran, @dennisjsaffran, is an appellate attorney and writer in Queens, NY.