Carlos Correa’s feet were the problem in 2023 and 2024.
Two years ago, the Minnesota Twins shortstop developed plantar fasciitis in his left heel. He played through it for 135 games but posted career-worst numbers at the plate and was limited on the bases and in the field.
Last season, after returning to form in a healthy, All-Star first half, Correa missed nearly the entire second half with another bout of plantar fasciitis, this time in his right heel. He played just 86 of 162 games for the Twins.
After back-to-back seasons ruined by different versions of the same injury, the health of Correa’s feet loomed large heading into this season.
First, the good news: Correa’s feet haven’t been an issue. He has played 34 of the Twins’ first 35 games, looking as good as ever defensively at shortstop and showing he can still run the bases at full effort when necessary.
Now, the bad news: Correa is off to the worst start of his career offensively, batting .216/.256/.304 with just one homer and six double plays in 133 plate appearances for a team-worst .560 OPS in a lineup full of struggling hitters.
Correa has been a replacement-level player, totaling 0.0 bWAR while being paid $37 million in the third season of a six-year, $200 million contract. And now the health of his left wrist is in question.
Carlos Correa is hurt. After swinging at a pitch, he has left the game due to a wrist issue. #MNTwins pic.twitter.com/i9YTbkl6UG
— Talkin’ Twins (@TalkinTwins) April 16, 2025
Correa tweaked his left wrist while swinging on April 15, leaving the game in the fifth inning and revealing afterward that he has dealt with pain in that wrist since late last season, undergoing multiple MRIs.
Correa insisted he could continue to play through it, and he has, but his performance hasn’t improved. And when asked on April 23 if he was still dealing with the wrist injury, Correa replied: “I’m dealing with my swing sucks right now. That’s the only thing I’m dealing with.”
Though his candor is appreciated, it seems Correa isn’t right physically for the third straight season. Given his poor performance and the odd ways in which his production has changed, it’s natural to assume the wrist injury is to blame when the alternative is a healthy 30-year-old falling off a cliff.
Star players aren’t immune from having bad months. Correa has had plenty of them, with the Twins and the Houston Astros. This isn’t even the worst 34-game stretch of his career. Correa had 34-game stretches with an OPS below his current .560 mark in 2018 and 2020. It happens.
But what makes this extended slump especially worrisome for the Twins is that it’s by far the worst 34-game stretch Correa has ever had to start a season, it involves the steep deterioration of his batted-ball metrics, and it comes attached to a now-known health problem that can logically be connected to swing issues.
Correa had a reputation as a slow starter even before this year, and that was somewhat borne out in his career numbers, but he has never started with an OPS anywhere near this low through his first 34 games of a season:
Correa’s worst OPS through 34 games
| YEAR | TEAM | OPS |
|---|---|---|
|
2025 |
.560 |
|
|
2023 |
.646 |
|
|
2021 |
.693 |
|
|
2022 |
.778 |
|
|
2020 |
.787 |
This is Correa’s worst season-opening OPS by a staggering 86 points. His next-lowest OPS through 34 games came in 2023, when he was dealing with plantar fasciitis in the worst full season of his career. It’s beyond a slow start, even for a slow starter.
Correa’s strong career track record has made manager Rocco Baldelli reluctant to drop him in the lineup. He has yet to bat lower than fifth and has come to the plate with a substantial 87 runners on base, driving in just nine of them while hitting .182 and going 0-for-6 with the bases loaded.
Correa is 12-for-65 (.185) in high- and medium-leverage situations, totaling more double plays (six) than extra-base hits (four). Because of his struggles in clutch spots and overall with runners on base, Correa has a Win Probability Added of -1.32, the worst mark on the Twins and fourth worst in MLB.
And while there’s almost always at least some bad luck in a stretch this bad — well-struck balls being caught for outs or possible extra-base hits landing just foul — there’s little in Correa’s expected numbers or batted-ball metrics to suggest he’s been particularly unlucky.
Sure, his .247 expected batting average is better than his actual .216 batting average, but that’s still not good. And the same is true of his .343 expected slugging percentage versus his actual .304 slugging percentage. All those numbers are bad and far worse than Correa’s pre-2025 norms.
Delve a bit deeper and the issues begin to reveal themselves. Correa isn’t whiffing more than usual, with an 18.8 percent strikeout rate lower than his 20.4 percent career mark and below the 22.0 percent league average. He has made plenty of contact, but the quality of that contact has plummeted.
On the most basic level, Correa simply hasn’t been hitting the ball as hard. His average exit velocity (89.4 mph) and max exit velocity (112.6 mph) are his lowest since 2020, and his hard-hit rate (40.2 percent) is his lowest since 2018. His average bat speed is down 1.4 mph relative to his 2023 and 2024 swings.
And even when he hits a ball hard, it’s been pounded into the ground. Correa’s average launch angle (8.4 degrees) is his lowest since 2016, and his ground-ball rate (49.5 percent) is his highest since 2020, which helps explain the disappearance of his power and reappearance of his double-play issues.
Carlos Correa celebrates his first hit of the season after making a bunch of hard-hit outs while starting 0-for-18: pic.twitter.com/Uardw3kNVr
— Aaron Gleeman (@AaronGleeman) April 2, 2025
Correa has often looked like someone just trying to fight off pitches to stay alive in at-bats, rarely pulling anything in the air with authority and instead slashing balls the other way with minimal force. He has barreled a career-low 4.1 percent of batted balls, which is less than half of his 9.1 percent lifetime rate.
Perhaps most uncharacteristically, he has struggled with fastballs after batting .295 and slugging .505 off them in the first decade of his career. This season, Correa has batted just .195 with a .299 slugging percentage versus fastballs, with similarly poor expected numbers.
Opposing pitchers have noticed, increasingly pounding the strike zone against Correa as their fear of him doing damage decreases. He has seen a career-high 51 percent of pitches in the zone after seeing fewer than 48 percent strikes in each of his first 10 seasons. They’re attacking him.
Correa has responded by getting more aggressive, swinging at a personal-high 66.5 percent of pitches in the zone and 31.3 percent of pitches out of the zone, his highest chase rate since 2020. On a related note, he has drawn only seven walks in 133 plate appearances, which equates to roughly half of his career walk rate.
There are few positives to take from Correa’s offensive performance this season. His expected numbers suggest any bad luck has been minimal because he’s not hitting the ball in the air with any authority. Pitchers are attacking him with fastballs, and he’s unable to punish them, fighting back with weak contact.
Correa was fantastic offensively last season, hitting .310 with the third-best OPS of his career, including returning from the injured list in September to hit .325 in 11 games. But at no point this year has he resembled that player, hitting .136 in spring training before this prolonged funk.
Given the length and extreme nature of this slump, and underlying metrics to match, it’s difficult not to assume the wrist is bothering Correa more than he has said. He simply hasn’t looked like himself, or even close, and a drop-off this sudden without a related injury would mean he’s in steep decline at 30.
Of course, it’s not necessarily an either-or situation. Correa’s lengthy injury history could be taking a physical toll even if it’s not directly responsible for his current poor performance, and he’s also at an age when All-Star players frequently decline whether or not they’re fully healthy.
For a below-.500 Twins team that desperately needs the All-Star version of Correa to help save this season, and for the remaining three years and $96 million on his contract from 2026 to 2028, it’s getting harder and harder to write this off as merely a random bad month.
(Photo: Jesse Johnson / Imagn Images)