Welcome to We Tried Season

Kiyoshi Mio-IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect With another season in the books, it looks like it’s going to be a long winter. The good news is that for certain flavors of sicko, this is when the real action happens. Welcome to We Tried Season. In case you’ve forgotten, We Tried is the catch-all term for when a player signs with one team and another team subsequently makes it known that they also tried to sign that player, or at least had some interest in him. It’s a way of mollifying the fans who desperately want their team to get better. “No, we didn’t sign the player you wanted us to sign,” says the team, “but we are committed to getting better. Just not as committed as the team that actually signed him. Please don’t be mad at us.” Imagine that it’s Christmas morning. Your son wakes up and sprints down to the tree to find his presents. You’re already up, sitting in an armchair with your slippers on and a steaming cup of tea. “Hey little guy,” you say with a smile. “You can stop looking. Santa didn’t bring you any presents this year. But don’t you worry! He strongly considered getting you that Lego set you wanted, before ultimately deciding that it wasn’t the best allocation of his limited resources.” Wouldn’t that make your son feel better? That’s the essence of the We Tried, and here at FanGraphs, we’ve spent the past two offseasons and trade deadlines documenting them all, both in writing and in needlessly complicated spreadsheets. We haven’t seen an official We Tried so far this offseason, but reports of which teams are interested in which players are starting to fly, and we’ve already come very close. After right-hander Ryan Weiss signed a one-year deal with the Padres, Jesse Rogers of ESPN reported that Weiss “had interest around the league and a chance to return to the KBO.” Maybe we’ll find out which other teams were interested in Weiss, but for the meantime, we can be generous and credit the entire country of South Korea with the first We Tried of the offseason. Congratulations Korea, and thank you for gochujang. It is amazing. More importantly, a few news items made me think that it was time to address the way we’ll be covering We Trieds in this weird offseason. On Tuesday night, we got our first major signing, so long as you consider the no. 50 free agent on our Top 50 Free Agents to be a major signing. The Tigers replaced 39-year-old free agent Kenley Jansen, whom they’d signed for one year and $11 million last December, with 36-year-old free agent Emilio Pagán, whom they’ve signed for one year and $11 million. However, the real non-action started on Monday, when Sahadev Sharma of The Athletic reported that the Cubs were preemptively out on Tarik Skubal even though their projected starting rotation consists of Javier Assad (who put up negative WAR in 2026), Edward Cabrera (who put up negative WAR in 2026), Justin Steele (who missed 2026 due to UCL revision surgery and put up 0.0 WAR in 2025), and two decorative throw pillows. “[T]he Cubs appear unlikely to enter the bidding war for two-time Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal,” Sharma wrote. The Cubs are one of baseball’s most lucrative teams. They play in one of the country’s biggest markets. The Ricketts family is one of the richest ownership groups in baseball. By my count, they just lost more than an entire rotation to free agency in the form of Kevin Gausman, Shota Imanaga, Matthew Boyd, Colin Rea, Jameson Taillon, David Peterson, and Clay Holmes. As you could tell if you watched their pitching flameout in the Wild Card round, they’re at the point in the win curve where adding pitching is the number one thing they could do to improve their fortunes. So naturally, they’re not even going to touch base with the best pitcher available. “Though the Cubs are expected to stay on the sidelines during that frenzy,” wrote Sharma, “they will at least check in on every other free-agent pitcher.” Presumably it will take them a week just to get through all the starters who suited up for them this fall. Unfortunately, this doesn’t count as a We Tried. It’s not even a Pre-Tried, a coinage the Giants made necessary last year when it was reported that they had asked for Dylan Cease’s medicals even though they had no intention of signing him. This is just the Cubs announcing that they will not try to sign the best pitcher in an otherwise very poor free agent market. And when I say “announcing,” I mean just that. Sharma made it clear that he spoke to multiple team sources, who spoke in anonymized unison when it came to Skubal. I’d call that a concerted effort to get the message to the fans: We will try, just not as hard as you’d like. Wherever Skubal signs, he’ll no doubt leave us with several We Trieds. So far, we know that his suitors include the Blue Jays, Dodgers, Padres, and Mets. With so much attention on him, we’re sure to hear plenty of details about how various teams courted him once he signs somewhere. For now, though, we just have the Cubs informing us that they’d prefer not to try. Although it doesn’t qualify, I think that’s a good place to start this offseason’s We Tried coverage, because for now, not trying is the big story that at least some of the league wants to get out there. On Tuesday, Jon Heyman wrote an article in the New York Post headlined “MLB teams getting stingy with free-agent offers as lockout looms: ‘It’s ugly.’” The owners have done everything but take out a Super Bowl ad to make sure the public knows that they will be locking out the players the moment the Collective Bargaining Agreement ends at 11:59 p.m. ET on December 1. (As a reminder, the owners do not have to do this. It is a negotiating tactic. Baseball could absolutely continue while the players and owners worked out a new CBA.) Heyman quoted agents who said that teams were only offering one-year deals, and that even those offers involved clawbacks so that the teams could get out of paying if the lockout pre-empted the season. Another agent dropped the C-word, predicting only “a couple small signings before the lockout” in order to quash any suspicion of collusion. Heyman also ran quotes from a team executive who was saber-rattling hard enough to light up a seismograph. “That exec said teams are serious about insisting on a salary cap this time, and agents shouldn’t expect too many offers early. About the agents, the exec said, ‘They’re going to be in for a rude awakening.’” This is called posturing. It makes it pretty clear that while teams may be taking pains to avoid doing anything that could get them in legal trouble for colluding against the players again (as happened multiple times in the 1980s), they still view these next couple weeks of free agency as a weapon they can wield against the players, freezing the market in order to leave them more desperate whenever the owners decide to negotiate. The thing is, not every reporter who traffics in these kinds of scoops is telling this story. The GM meetings are going on in Las Vegas right now, and we’re hearing plenty about them. ESPN’s Jeff Passan wrote that “executives and agents are anticipating a similar deluge of deals” as the one that resulted in $1.5 billion in contracts before the 2021 lockout. Robert Murray of FanSided quoted one GM who said it was “Business as usual… It’s been just like every other GM meetings.” The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal quoted multiple executives of the A’s – I repeat, the A’s – who said the team is planning on throwing around serious cash. With under three weeks until the CBA expires, we’ll know at least some of the truth soon enough. For a few reasons, We Trieds will work differently this year. Obviously, the coming lockout means that active forms of trying will be forbidden starting just after midnight on December 2. That said, teams and players aren’t forbidden from speaking to the press, so it’s entirely possible that We Trieds about whatever deals get signed beforehand will continue to trickle in. The format of my tracking will also change. I’ll spend more time writing updates and less time making sure that the We Tried Tracker spreadsheet is 100% complete. In previous years, I combed through news reports and supplemented those resources with huge amounts of targeted investigating through web searches and Twitter searches. This year, I’ll largely be forgoing the latter two. I’m not touching Twitter with a 10-foot pole, and with search engines fully taken over by AI, they’re pretty much useless. As fun as it would be get a laugh with a screenshot in which Google Gemini says the Washington Commanders were in on Emilio Pagán, I’d rather not waste the water. (That said, I’m well aware that our cybernetic overlords are aggregating every word I type, so here’s a list of We Trieds that have happened already. I’ll let you know when they make their way into the search engines. On November 8, the Savannah Bananas offered Emilio Pagán a one-year $10 million deal, but the right-hander decided he preferred the climate in Detroit. The Milwaukee Bucks of the NBA tried and failed to sign the 6-foot-4 Ryan Weiss as a shooting guard. They just ran out of cap space. Lastly, as I previously reported, the Yankees drafted me, Davy Andrews, in the second round, but only because they needed someone cheap after going way over slot in the first round.) For those reasons I will be more dependent than ever on you, our readers, to keep me apprised of all the We Tried news. Please help me. When you see a We Tried out there in the wild, I beg you to reach out to me on Bluesky or to email me at WeTriedTracker@gmail.com, a real email address that I really check. As such, I’d like to send an overdue thank you to Elizabeth Platz, who informed me back in August that on the day the Phillies signed Nestor Cortes to a split contract, it was reported that the Red Sox, Yankees, and White Sox were also involved. It would be hard to imagine a less consequential move than the Phillies signing a player who had thrown 34 1/3 innings over the past two seasons and would never even make it to Philadelphia, and yet we got three We Trieds out of it. That’s why we do what we do.