I ... uh ... Correa ... what?

Well, thank you to Steve Cohen, I guess … it has been a good while since I’ve woken up to truly shocking baseball news. Carlos Correa is going to the Mets? Wait? What? How?

Those kind of sports shocks used to happen all the time, back in the dark ages before the Internet, before social media, before 24-hour news, before friends had the ability to send text messages to one another. One thing I have such a hard time explaining to my kids was how in the dark we were all the time. We couldn’t get scores. We couldn’t get news. We had to wait for the morning paper.

Some of you are old enough to remember this: On NFL Sundays, we would be watching one game just so we could get news on another game that we actually cared about. Back then, when the football announcer calling the Denver-Seattle game would say, “Let’s go to New York for an update,” it was a BIG DEAL, it was our one chance to find out what was actually happening in the Cleveland-Oakland game.

I can remember times when it was after 7 p.m., and “60 Minutes” was already on television, and I still didn’t know who won the Browns game, and I’d be entirely freaked out. That’s when I’d be scanning radio stations to try and get the news and, when that didn’t work, I’d actually call the newspaper or a local television station and ask if they knew.

Point is: I used to wake up to jolting Correa-like news all the time.

I’d mostly forgotten that feeling.

So, as I say, thank you, Steve Cohen?

Many of us have been waiting for Cohen to go fully rogue as owner of the New York Mets. There’s plenty to say about Steve Cohen’s business practices, of course, and you can have at it in the comments if you like, but in the sports realm he has long struck me as a potential game changer. He brings three chemical ingredients that, when mixed, can create a real baseball explosion.

1. He’s a lunatic Mets fan. I don’t mean to say that other billionaire owners are not fans, many of them are. But, as a baseball fan, Cohen is more like one of us. He’s the kind of guy who would call WFAN to complain about the team not trying. He’s the kind of guy who would (and does) tweet loony baseball things that come unfiltered from the heart. When the Mets lose, he clearly feels real pain — maybe more pain than he does in any other part of his life, I don’t know.

2. He’s fabulously wealthy. All the baseball owners are fabulously wealthy, but he’s richer than they are. His net worth is supposedly $16 billion. Do you know how much money $16 billion is? No, you don’t, I don’t, none of us do. It’s an amount beyond our understanding.

3. He doesn’t care how much money he spends. Cohen has made that part clear from the beginning. He doesn’t seem to care about money … or at least doesn’t care about money as much as he cares about the Mets winning.

Put those three things together and, yeah, that’s how you get this Carlos Correa madness.

We all thought Correa was going to the Giants on that wild, 13-year, $350 million deal. Only then, I guess, there was some undisclosed issue with Correa’s physical. As I write this, the only thing that we know about the issue is that (a) it’s not back-related and (b) Correa’s agent, Scott Boras, and the Giants disagreed about its significance.

Well, I guess we also know (c) the physical issue bothered the Giants enough that at almost the last minute they postponed their scheduled Tuesday late-morning press conference to officially welcome Correa to the Giants.

That postponement seemed like fairly minor news in the moment. Surely they’d work it out and have the press conference a day or two later.

Only, no, apparently they couldn’t work it out … or, more likely, each side decided it didn’t WANT to work it out. I mean that deal fell apart SO FAST. The only thing I can guess is that San Francisco was having buyer’s remorse, Boras and Correa were not entirely sold on San Francisco being the right team, and once there was a snag, both sides immediately hit the eject button.

I imagine that within 12 seconds of the Giants deal falling apart, Boras was on the phone with Cohen, who was in Hawaii. Here’s how I imagine the conversation going:

BORAS: Steve, hi, Scott here. The Giants deal fell apart.

COHEN [hand over receiver]: Yeah, can you bring us another round of mai tais? [To Boras]: Sorry, Scott, what were you saying?

BORAS: Correa is yours if you want him.

COHEN: Giants thing collapsed, huh? Why? Health thing?

BORAS: It’s nothing, Steve.

COHEN: OK. Look, I’m not giving him a 13-year deal.

BORAS: How about 12 years?

COHEN: $315 million.

BORAS: You got yourself a shortstop.

COHEN: Third baseman. We already have a shortstop.

BORAS: Fine. Whatever.

Correa’s 12-year, $315 million deal is basically the same annual value as the Giants deal. And it means that the Mets’ 40-man payroll projects to $384 million. That’s just … well, we told you that Steve Cohen doesn’t care about money, not when it comes to his Mets.

Projected 40-man payrolls for 2023:

1. New York Mets, $384.4 million

2. New York Yankees, $290 million

3. San Diego Padres, $267.4 million

4. Philadelphia Phillies, $231.5 million

5. Toronto Blue Jays, $231.2 million

Now, obviously, this is all still in flux — you would expect the Dodgers to get in here at some point — but what’s not in flux is that the Mets will spend almost $100 million more than any other team PLUS at least $100 million in payroll tax.

Now put your thumb and forefinger together and squeeze them really tight.

That’s how much I think Steve Cohen cares about the money.

“What the heck’s the difference,” he told the New York Post’s Jon Heyman. “If you’re going to make the move, make the move.”

That Mets lineup is pretty ridiculous now. The lineup could look like this:

1. Brandon Nimmo

2. Francisco Lindor

3. Carlos Correa

4. Pete Alonso

5. Starling Marte

6. Jeff McNeil

7. Daniel Vogelbach

8. Mark Canha

9. Tomas Nido

That’s not just a good lineup, it’s an absurdly versatile one, you could move McNeil or Marte up to the No. 2 spot, drop Lindor into the three, move Correa to the five, or you could swap Correa and Lindor or you could …

When you spent $380 million on players, you should have options.

Correa is headed to New York in a shocker. (Carmen Mandato/Getty Images)

There’s plenty of time to talk about whether or not this makes the Mets favorites to win the pennant or even to win their absurdly loaded division. But we must end this one by talking about this painful offseason for the San Francisco Giants.

Going back to the very beginning, when the Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958, they have had to deal with all those harsh comparisons to their flashier and more glamorous rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Giants had Willie Mays. The Giants had Juan Marichal. The Giants had Barry Bonds. But the Dodgers were the team in blue that kept winning World Series and kept leading baseball in attendance and kept drawing all those Hollywood stars to the games.

Then, in the 2010s, the Giants came upon some magic dust, and they won three World Series with a batch of scrappers and overachievers and bearded wonders and Madison Bumgarner. The Dodgers, meanwhile, couldn’t quite put it together. Good times in the Bay.

Then, over the last five or so years, the Dodgers re-established their dominance and, to everyone’s shock, the San Diego Padres, of all teams, decided to buy into the high-stakes poker game. And the Giants, suddenly, seemed ordinary. Less than ordinary. Other than the bizarre, everything-went-right 2021 season, they played losing baseball.

And this was the offseason when the Giants were going to get back to where they once belonged. They would sign hometown hero Aaron Judge!!! They would sign Jacob deGrom!! They would sign Trea Turner! They would sign Carlos Rodon. They would sign Dansby Swanson. They would sign somebody big, anybody big, and then finally they made that monster offer to Carlos Correa that didn’t really make a whole lot of baseball sense, but you know, they had to get somebody.

And now, they got nobody. Well, not nobody, I guess they signed Sean Manaea.

Baseball these days is not for the faint of heart. It’s Steve Cohen’s world now.