Wrapping up the We Tried Tracker

I’m sorry to be the one to break this news to you, but the baseball season is starting in earnest tomorrow. While I’m sure you’re happy that you’ll once again get to watch the baseball men do the baseball thing, this also means that We Tried season is very sadly drawing to a close. This will be our fifth and final entry in the series, but as a refresher, We Tried is the term of art for an ex post facto report about a team’s interest in a player who signed elsewhere. If a beat writer reported that your favorite team had interest in a free agent, but only after that free agent became a Dodger, or if a scoops guy laundered the claim that your team took aim at a trade target and missed, I added it to the We Tried Tracker. With 49 of our Top 50 Free Agents off the board – seriously, somebody sign David Robertson already – it’s time to look back on the offseason that wasn’t. How wrong Yoda was; there’s no “do” or “do not.” There is only “try.”

As I searched for the final few additions to the tracker, I continued to refine the criteria for inclusion. For example, I decided at the last minute to honor A.J. Preller’s solemn assertion during the Winter Meetings that the Padres were “involved in, so far, almost all the catchers that have gone off the board to some degree.” I awarded them five extra We Trieds, all for catchers. That pushed them all the way up to second on our leaderboard, but they still finished dead last in our catcher positional power rankings. I also decided not to include the Roki Sasaki circus. The defining characteristic of a We Tried is that the information is publicized after the player signs, and although a few details did come out after he chose the Dodgers, nearly every part of Sasaki’s courtship involved up-to-the-minute updates. Likewise, the Orioles and Braves were both widely linked to Nathan Eovaldi early in the offseason, but once Eovaldi decided to return to the Rangers, no new information on their pursuits emerged. They didn’t capital-T try; they just – yawn – actually tried.

By my count, we bore witness to 99 We Trieds for 39 different players over the last few months. As always, I’m sure that I missed some, and I implore you to help me make it right. What a joy it would be to reach 100. If you spot an omission, please message me on Bluesky or email me at WeTriedTracker@gmail.com, which once again is a real email address that I really check. I reply to every message, and I even read everything in the spam folder. The tracker recently received an incredible offer for a “diamond facelit sign” with a three-year warrantee. I don’t know what a facelit sign is, and because the email is riddled with spelling errors, for a while I actually thought it was for a diamond facelift. I was so confused about what would happen were I to avail myself of the three-year warrantee. Would I get my money back? Would they lift my face even further? Would they replace it with a new one?

If you’re keeping score at home, 99 We Trieds works out to 3.3 per team. However, the distribution was anything but even. The top five teams represented more than half of the We Trieds. Fully half of the teams in baseball were credited with at least two or fewer. Although every single team ended up signing at least one free agent, a plurality didn’t register a single We Tried: the Cardinals, Rockies, White Sox, Marlins, Pirates, Cardinals, and Brewers. One of these things is not like the other. The Cardinals are starting a rebuild, and the next four teams didn’t register a We Tried because they are actively not trying. At this point, not trying is very nearly their entire identity (though this might be slightly unfair to the Rockies, who often seem to be trying to do something; it’s just unclear what that something might be). That leaves the Brewers, who are mostly just a good baseball team. They got some unwanted publicity a few weeks ago when owner Mark Attanasio argued glibly that he shouldn’t be trying to win the World Series, but the front office is absolutely trying to win despite the constraints Attanasio puts on them. The Brewers have traded and signed free agents, and although they’re bargain hunting, it appears they stayed off the leaderboard mainly because they run a tight ship without leaks, tactical or otherwise.

On the other end of the spectrum, Boston’s 13 We Trieds paced the field and then some. The Red Sox, Orioles, and Blue Jays formed a cluster at the top of the leaderboard, and I would throw the Cubs into this group as well. These were teams that really wanted to improve their rosters – and with the possible exception of the Orioles, they did just that – but they coupled their aggression with prudence, possibly to a fault. They went after a huge number of free agents, big and small, but they set firm limits. The Red Sox showed a very clear preference for one-year deals in order to mitigate risk. The Orioles seemingly wanted in on every free agent, but there was never a clear sense of how much money, if any, they were actually willing to spend. If you’ve ever heard Blue Jays GM Ross Atkins speak, you know that he sounds like every old-school baseball fan’s worst sabermetric nightmare come to life. When contract negotiations with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. fell apart very publicly, his idea of damage control was to tell reporters, “We have gone well past what our rational point of objectivity framing what the contract value is.” Problem solved. After all, how can you not be romantic about the rational point of objectively framing contract value? Even better were Jed Hoyer’s comments at Cubs Convention, in which he detailed the way the Cubs were laser-focused on finding the exact right players, the perfect fits, to upgrade their bullpen: “Listen, we’ve talked to dozens of relievers this offseason.” These teams eventually found players willing to accept deals that conformed to their extremely narrow conception of value, but in order to do so, they seemingly speed dated the entire field, content to follow the Andrew Friedman Principle and finish third with completely rational offers over and over again.

One of my favorite things about this months-long endeavor was learning that a whole lot of free agent courtships begin with a Zoom call. I joked about this in the second installment of the series, when I learned that Blake Snell first met with the Yankees over Zoom. I found it sort of incomprehensible that teams making life- and franchise-altering decisions begin that process over the same glitchy technology that the rest of us begrudgingly relegate to the corner of our screen during Friday staff meetings, with the rest of the screen devoted to Immaculate Grid. But it turns out this is a real thing. It’s how business is done in Major League Baseball, and I read about so many Zooms. According to Robert Murray, Alex Anthopoulos wowed Jurickson Profar with a great Zoom call, and Michael Kay reported that the Yankees impressed Max Fried with their own 90-minute Zoom. Both players ended up signing with their Zoom crushes. For any normal person, an hour and a half on Zoom is enough to ruin your whole week, but I guess normal people aren’t getting $218 million after they log off. Presumably, Profar and Fried were late to their meetings just like the rest of us because they couldn’t join until Zoom completed a system update. The real lesson is that if you’re GM looking to make a splash, you should probably invest in a ring light.

I also loved the terminology. The most popular euphemisms were exactly the ones you’d expect. Teams were in on players, they were involved, they were in the mix, and they had interest. They checked in, they inquired, they showed interest, they had conversations, they stayed in touch. They even asked players to wait while they pursued other, more important free agents. “They looked at me,” Anthony Santander told the Detroit Free Press about the Tigers, “but they were looking at the third baseman as the priority because that was the spot they needed the most. I was next. They were showing interest, like calling and making sure I was still available, but I was second in line… The only thing I know is they were really interested in me, but after the third baseman.” (Presumably, the third baseman was Alex Bregman.) The Tigers never made an offer to Santander, who ultimately signed with the Blue Jays. Nobody wants to be someone else’s second choice.

I found nine We Tried in which the exact years and dollar values of an offer were reported. I found eight more where all that was reported was whether the offer was better or worse than the deal the player signed: three were better offers, five were worse. But just as often, we simply heard that a team made an offer, they made a big offer, they made a serious push, they showed strong interest, they were highly competitive, they were aggressors, they were finalists.

My favorite We Trieds by far were the lame ones (also known as the Weak Trieds). According to Joel Sherman, Brian Cashman merely “envisioned” Willy Adames playing for the Yankees, while Jon Heyman reported that the Yankees “appreciated” Pete Alonso. I firmly believe that everyone should appreciate both Adames and Alonso, but no matter how many compliments you route through the Woodward and Bernstein of the New York Post’s baseball beat, if you want to sign them to a multi-year deal, you’re probably going to have to hop on a Zoom call.

Then there were the Rays and the Royals, both of whom reportedly checked in on Juan Soto. They just checked in. On Juan Soto. Every other competitor put on a full-court press. They wrangled Hall of Famers and current stars to add gravitas to their pitches. They put Soto’s name in lights. They offered unimaginable riches and onsite daycare. The Rays, who will be on the road for nearly all of July and August in order to avoid monsoon season, just checked in. How did it go when the Royals texted Scott Boras just to check in?

So what have we learned after spending the winter awarding partial credit, meticulously keeping score to decide who won the most participation trophies? I think we learned about which teams rely on tactical leaks and which teams run tight ships. We learned that most of these leaks go to the national scoop hunters who traffic in information, rather than beat reporters who focus on one team. We Trieds are often designed to mollify a fanbase, but just as often, they’re micro-transactions designed to keep the gears of the rumor mill well oiled. A deeper analysis might even teach us which agents are prone to spreading this kind of news, or helping us draw connections between certain reporters and certain teams or agents.

I pulled a few numbers to check the correlations. Going by Cot’s Contracts, there was definitely a correlation between the number of We Trieds and a team’s CBT payroll for the 2025 season (and an even stronger correlation to payroll rank). You can see in the scatterplot above that lots of teams had just a couple We Trieds, but no team was really racking them up unless they were also going out and spending money. While the We Tried is largely a cynical maneuver, there’s almost always some truth behind it. No one is constantly telling fans that they’re trying to land free agents unless they really do plan on signing some. In that sense, fans should be hoping to hear that their team is trying. However, I also pulled each team’s record over the past five years and found that winning percentage over that time had a much weaker correlation to this offseason’s We Trieds. The weakest correlation of all was to a team’s projected 2025 record. This year at least, there’s basically no correlation between how hard you say you’re trying over the offseason and the projected quality of the team you actually put together. The two teams that improved the most over the offseason, the Red Sox and the Dodgers, were on opposite sides of the spectrum. When teams tell you they tried, believe them. But that doesn’t mean you have to believe in them.