David Robertson and the Possibility of a We Tried Tracker: Deadline Edition

Yesterday, I wrote up the news that David Robertson had signed with the Phillies. In my (and, I assume, everyone else’s) favorite paragraph, I mentioned that several teams had reportedly been in on the veteran right-hander. Ken Rosenthal and Jon Heyman combined to mention interest from the Mets, Yankees, Red Sox, Tigers, and “many others.” Depending on your perspective, this marked either the last We Tried of the 2025 free agency period or the first of the trade deadline period. As a quick refresher, We Tried is a catch-all term for any time we find out, after a player has ended up with one team, that another team also tried to land them. In its purest form, the We Tried is a front office’s bid for partial credit, an attempt to curry favor with the fans by demonstrating that it is trying to build a winner for them. I spent the offseason documenting each and every one in a disturbingly comprehensive spreadsheet.

I didn’t make a meal of this yesterday, mainly because Robertson’s free agency was a real outlier. The offseason ended months ago. He’s a 40-year-old reliever who didn’t get an offer he loved, so he stayed in shape and spent the spring hanging out with his family, then held a workout for teams on Saturday in order to sign before the deadline. Lots of teams were in on him and lots of teams showed up to watch him pitch, so word of who was there was bound to come out at some point. It definitely represented a We Tried, but it didn’t seem earth-shattering, and it was by no means a typical one.

Then I checked my phone this morning. Both Craig Goldstein and Daniel R. Epstein of Baseball Prospectus had tagged me on an article by Tim Healey of the Boston Globe, and folks, I can confirm that finding your people is a wonderful feeling. Here’s the headline that made Craig and Dan think of me:

It seemed like we were veering into traditional We Tried territory. Not only were the Red Sox in on Robertson, we were getting what sounds like classic team-speak about how very hard they tried. When I first introduced the concept of the tracker, the Red Sox were widely predicted to be the favorite, and they more than lived up to that billing. For whatever reason, the Boston front office has long held a policy of radical transparency, at least when it comes to whiffs on free agents. This policy predates the Craig Breslow era, but it has certainly continued under his steely gaze. Over the offseason, the Red Sox led all teams with 13 We Trieds, and the Padres and the Blue Jays were the only other teams to reach nine. The Red Sox had more We Trieds than the bottom 14 teams combined.

Knowing all that, if all you read of Healey’s article was the headline, you’d understandably assume that this was more of the same, but that’s not what happened. The Red Sox didn’t leak it. The Phillies happened to be playing the Red Sox on Monday, and Robertson spoke to reporters in the dugout at Citizens Bank Park before the game. The fact that the Red Sox were in on him had already been reported, so it was understandable that a Boston writer would ask about it. Robertson confirmed that Breslow himself was at the workout on Saturday, continuing, “Bres is a great guy. The Boston Red Sox are a great organization. It didn’t work out for my family to go there this year. It was a great pitch. Everybody had a good pitch. I just had to go where I felt comfortable and where it felt right for me and my family.”

That makes Robertson just the second player to confirm his own We Tried since we started this exercise. The first was Carlos Santana, another highly regarded, heavily recruited elder statesman. It seems that only once you reach your late 30s are you allowed to sound like a human being and tell the honest truth about your decision-making process during free agency. Robertson also mentioned that one of the reasons he waited until now to sign was that he didn’t want to be moved at the deadline, revealing that he considered retirement after the Mets traded him to the Marlins in 2023. Knowing this, I feel duty-bound to mention that the Phillies have the chance to do the funniest thing ever. They absolutely shouldn’t trade Robertson on July 31. It would be extremely uncool. It would be downright cruel. But it would also be pretty funny.

As Robertson’s situation illustrates, it’s hard to say how many more We Trieds we’ll see over the next week and change. The motivations and the timeframe are very different at this point in the season. During the offseason, everybody’s expecting to add at least a few players, so when you whiff on one, letting your fans know that you were in on them represents an implicit assurance that you’ll get the next one. The compressed timeframe of the trade deadline, with tons of deals being announced at and even after the very last minute, means there’s no future to reassure the fans about. It’s the last chance. Either you traded for someone or you didn’t, and announcing that you had designs on a player who went to another contender is more likely to make it look like you weren’t committed strongly enough to get the deal done. It’s also trickier to execute a We Tried on a trade. You don’t want to alienate your own players by announcing that you almost traded them away or nearly acquired someone to take their spot. You don’t want to upset other teams by announcing that they almost traded one of their players. You don’t want to comment on players or teams in your division or with whom you’ll be competing for a playoff spot.

For all of these reasons, we’re not announcing a “We Tried Tracker, Trade Deadline Edition: F— It, We Ball” – at least not yet. But I will be keeping my eyes open for We Trieds as deadline deals start flying, and I humbly request that you do the same and let me know if you spot one. You can reach me on Bluesky and you can email me at WeTriedTracker@gmail.com. As always, I remind you that this is a real email address that I really check. On that note, whoever is responsible for the hundreds of spam emails I’ve received, which consist almost entirely of weather updates for Cook County, Illinois, and job postings addressed to a presumably fictional person named Michael Anderson, you are officially dead to me.

So that’s where we are. We are not starting a We Tried Tracker for the trade deadline, but we’re officially thinking about it, so I want you to put the word out there that we back up. Possibly. I want you to put the word out there that we may possibly be back up. I can’t say for certain that it will happen, but I can promise you that I’ll try.