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It was a surprise when he landed in Minnesota in 2022. That he came back in 2023, with nine more years of team control beyond that, seemed almost too good to be true. Then, when a foot injury slowed him virtually all season, the frustrations toward a guy twice passed over for health reasons mounted. Maybe "too good to be true" was right. Coming into spring training this year, Carlos Correa noted feeling entirely different. He was healthy and good to go.
Thirty-two games into his second season (he missed about three weeks with an intercostal strain in April), Correa owns an .817 OPS, good enough for a 134 OPS+. His on-base skills are back to an elite level, and he’s once again crushing the ball. All of this is taking place while he is back to playing incredible defense and leading a Minnesota team desperate for his presence. He isn’t quite tracking toward the 6.3 fWAR he posted during his last season with Houston, but at this rate, he should be well above his career averages.
Looking under the hood, it’s hard to find a place where Correa hasn’t made strikes. His walk rate is a career best, and his strikeout rate is just off a career low. His barrel rate is above 10% for just the third time in his career, and the quality of contact has generated an xBA of .298, 30 points higher than his actual batting average. The expected slugging and wOBA are also heavily to his favor, and as a savant of the numbers, you best bet he knows it.
When at his best, Correa is a line-drive hitter capable of over-the-fence power, but without depending on that to create positive value. His 32% ground ball rate is the lowest of his career, and the 32.6% line drive rate is the highest. That reverses a trend from last year, when part of the damage done by his injury seemed to be compromised drive off his back leg, leading to a lot of ground balls. Although the hard-hit rate has room to grow, he’s never generated less soft contact. He's locked in, making excellent swing decisions, chasing outside the zone at the lowest rate of his career and whiffing as rarely as ever. Pitchers have to come into the zone on him, and when they do, he's ready to punish them.
Even with his feet healthy again, he's no speed demon. Conservatism and a certain picking of spots to turn on the jets have characterized his game for years. His sprint speed is up this year, though, and he's rangier on defense than he was throughout 2023. Although the metrics don’t speak of him as glowingly in the field, his arm talent remains elite, and it’s clear to see that he’s a different player in 2024.
Outside of a brief stint on the injured list, his body has cooperated in the exact ways he’d hoped it would. For a guy tightly attuned to his own health and visibly frustrated each time his body betrayed him last year, it has to be a great mental relief to feel better and be able to do what he knows he's capable of doing.
Correa will be an indispensable driver of the Twins' efforts to chase down the Cleveland Guardians and Kansas City Royals and regain their standing atop the AL Central. The pair of teams at the top of the division have been much hotter and luckier out of the gate, and they're not going to ease off the accelerator from here. Minnesota will need to do more to substantiate themselves as a competitor, but with a healthy Correa, they're capable of it.
The Twins already have one fragile would-be superstar, in Byron Buxton. That’s going to be a constant and nagging issue for the duration of his career. It wasn’t expected to be a similar situation for Correa, and now, it seems that 2023 was more of an outlier than an indication of the future. That couldn’t be a better development, for all involved.
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