We Tried Tracker: Skubal De La Cruz Deadline Edition

I thought I’d left this life behind. I thought my We Tried tracking days were behind me. I spent the past week covering trades that happened. Real trades, where one player (or two players, or three players, or a theoretical pile of international bonus pool money) moved from one team to another in exchange for one other player (or two other players, or, well, you get it). But just when I thought I was out, the Brewers pulled me back in. Of all teams, the Brewers! I started tracking We Trieds following the 2024 season, and over two offseasons, Milwaukee put up two goose eggs. The Brewers never gave me a single We Tried to track. Now they’ve had such a dramatic We Tried that they’re dragging me kicking and screaming out of We Tried retirement. What a world. Oh, and the Red Sox roped me back in too, because of course they did. But let’s start in Milwaukee.

As you might have learned from Michael Baumann, the Brewers were considered a real contender to land Tarik Skubal. That alone does not a We Tried make, but on Tuesday, MLB.com’s Adam McCalvy spilled all sorts of beans about their ace chase. McCalvy talked to “multiple club officials” and found the Brewers uncharacteristically forthcoming. He learned that although top overall prospect Jesús Made was off limits, the Brewers offered shortstop Luis Peña, whom we have ranked 26th overall on our updated Top 100 Prospects list, and two other position player prospects. One of those other prospects was also a Top 100 talent, which, depending on whose top 100 you’re talking about, could mean Brady Ebel, Jett Williams, Josh Adamczewski, or Luis Lara (though probably not Lara, as the Brewers signed him to an extension in June). That’s quite a lot of specifics.

A friend sent this article to me within an hour of its publication. It hits all the We Tried hallmarks. It lays out the offer the Brewers made, speculates on the players included and the players the Dodgers would have liked them to include. As I read on, I couldn’t help myself. I knew I’d have to get back in the game.

Honestly, if I were keeping a deadline tracker, I wouldn’t even know how to categorize this one. It featured so many of the buzzwords that it felt like McCalvy was going for a blackout in We Tried bingo. The Brewers “finished among the runners up.” They “were willing to go there.” They “believed they made a strong offer… maybe a stronger one than the Dodgers.” McCalvy also had direct quotes from the major players. Manager Pat Murphy said, “I know we went after trying to get that player.” He then delivered our first ever Double-Negative We Tried: “To say that the Brewers didn’t try is simply incorrect.” President of baseball operations Matt Arnold got in on the action, saying that the Brewers were “aggressive,” that they “tried to thread the needle,” and that they “were prepared to push a lot of chips in.” Oh, and the URL of the article is literally:

https://www.mlb.com/brewers/news/brewers-tried-to-trade-for-tarik-skubal.

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I don’t in any way mean to make fun of McCalvy here. His article really was quite revealing. It featured none of the vagueness that so often characterizes a We Tried, and it showed a side of the team we haven’t seen in years. For so long, the Brewers have been very buttoned up about player acquisition, and I’d wondered whether it was because they simply weren’t interested in making these sort of splashy moves at all, because they ran an extremely tight ship, or because they had some sort of organizational policy against discussing potential moves. Well, here they are not just thinking about going for the biggest get on the trade market, but making a genuine offer, and they can’t wait to talk about it. This is why people tell you not to bottle things up. Eventually, you might explode.

Still, the article had one more hallmark of a classic We Tried: credulity. It mentioned as an afterthought the important detail that revealed why this offer that was supposedly stronger than the Dodgers’ ended up failing: “The Tigers, though, wanted a controllable Major League pitcher in the deal. None of the sources would say who they favored, but Logan Henderson was among the names teams were asking for most often. So, we can’t say for sure which three names were in the Brewers’ best offer. But it was strong.” The last sentence doesn’t quite go with the first two.

Say you go to a restaurant and order some food and the waiter says, “I’m so sorry, Margie, but we’re fresh out of food. Can I instead offer you three pounds of assorted spoons?” (Oh, I should mention that in this scenario, your name is Margie and the waiter knows that your name is Margie because you went to high school together. You didn’t run in the same circles, but it was a small enough school that everybody knew everybody’s name. You’re all grown up now. He’s a waiter and you’re a person named Margie with enough money to afford dinner at a restaurant.) Now, on the one hand, the spoons the waiter offered you are worth way more money than the food you ordered. He considers it a strong offer! But you came to the restaurant for food. You don’t want spoons. You already have a whole drawer full of cutlery back at home. For reasons you’ve never quite understood, you even have a couple slotted spoons. You probably consider that a weak offer, and since you’re the one who is offering something the other actually wants, your opinion is the one that matters here. So while the Brewers feel they made a strong offer, the Tigers (who are Margie in this scenario) may beg to differ.

Now let’s head to Boston. If you’ve followed the We Tried updates over the past couple years – and I’m going to assume that you have, Margie, because it makes me feel better – then you know that from day one, the Red Sox have never not led the league in We Trieds. They just can’t help themselves, and this past weekend was a great example. They made multiple huge moves at the deadline. They gave up Connelly Early for roughly 75 minutes of Curtis Mead. They gave up on Marcelo Mayer. They went all in on Adley Rutschman. No other team came close to making that many high-impact trades. The Red Sox were by far the biggest actual movers. And yet we’re still here talking about a big deal that never even came close to happening.

I don’t know whether it’s because the Red Sox try to swing more deals than other teams, because they run a particularly leaky ship, or because they just want their fans to know about every single thought that pops into their heads, but they’ve got the most effortful front office in baseball and it’s not particularly close. I mean, I guess I can think of more possible reasons.

Maybe it’s because the town of Boston just demands to know about things that didn’t end up happening. Maybe Boston is the Counterfactual Capital of the Cosmos. Maybe if things had gone slightly differently on April 18, 1775, Paul Revere still would’ve galloped from Medford to Arlington to Lexington, but he would’ve been shouting, “The British showed interest in coming but ultimately decided a move wasn’t in their best long-term interests!”

Maybe the Boston sports media has Craig Breslow’s office bugged. Maybe Sean McAdam, Alex Speier, Tim Healey, Jen McCaffrey, Rob Bradford, Gabrielle Starr, Brandon Glick, Chris Cotillo, Pete Abraham, and Peter Gammons – that’s right, this thing goes all the way to the top! – have conspired to place listening devices in every square inch of Breslow’s workspace. Perhaps our own David Laurila is even in on it. The more I think about it, the more likely it sounds. There’s just one problem with this theory, though. I watched last year’s Netflix documentary closely, and Breslow’s office is pretty darn spartan.

He has just two pictures on the window sill and one more on the wall. Aside from his computer, the only thing he keeps on his desk is a red stapler. We have no way of knowing whether it’s a Swingline or a Boston, but from now on, when you picture Breslow working hard doing chief baseball officer stuff, make sure that mental image includes plenty of stapling. My point is that there really isn’t an obvious place to put a listening device. If the Boston sports intelligentsia is surveilling Breslow, the only option I can see is to slip the bug into his iced coffee each morning. Yeah, even the Dunkin Donuts guy is in on it. (John Henry’s office, on the other hand, definitely isn’t bugged.)

Regardless of the reasons for it, though, the Red Sox delivered a doozy of a We Tried. On Saturday, Sean McAdam of MassLive published a column with the headline “Red Sox trade rumors: Talks with Reds involving Elly De La Cruz go nowhere.” You have to love the over-the-top cynicism of the headline. Two days before the trade deadline, the Red Sox had a We Tried on one of the game’s biggest young stars, who has three years left of club control, and who currently ranks 13th on the combined WAR leaderboard. Why not just announced they’d tried and failed to lasso the moon?

I’m not indifferent to the poetry involved in trying to add an O and an X to De La Cruz’s jersey. If you’re looking at things strictly by the numbers, the pieces of a deal were all right there. The Red Sox are flush with prospects and young major league talent. Shortstop has been a black hole for them since they signed Trevor Story ahead of the 2022 season. De La Cruz will enter arbitration next year, extension talks have so far failed, and as a top-five shortstop in baseball, he’s sure to earn some bank. But you have to look at things a bit more holistically here.

De La Cruz is one of the game’s leading lights. At this point, he is the Reds, and I don’t just mean that he’s the face of the franchise. Since he debuted on June 6, 2023, De La Cruz has put up over 40% of the Reds’ position player WAR. Over that same timeframe – and keep in mind that because of a quad strain that crushed his second-half production last year, De La Cruz has only had one full, healthy season – only three players have accounted for a higher percentage of their team’s position player WAR. And two of those players probably shouldn’t count, because they’re on the Rockies, who have combined for roughly half as much position player WAR as De La Cruz himself.

It would take a lot to pry a player as integral as De La Cruz away from the Reds. A very strong offer, you might say. Earlier reports said that the Reds would only listen to offers that included young major league talent. And then on July 28, Rob Bradford, who covers (who else) the Red Sox for WEEI, reported that the Reds were no longer even considering moving De La Cruz, noting that “inquiring teams are being told not to bother.” So what did the Red Sox do? Did they stop trying? Did they blow the Reds away with a strong offer full of young major league talent? Of course not. They offered, to a team that was no longer listening, exactly what that team didn’t want, “a package mostly made up of prospects.” Unsurprisingly, the Reds declined the spoons.

As always, I will close by encouraging you to let me know about any We Trieds you see out there in the wild. I know I’m not running an official deadline tracker, but I still want to keep abreast of all the news that didn’t happen. Send me a message on Bluesky or email me at WeTriedTracker@gmail.com, a real email address I really check, though recently not as often as I should (sorry Gavin). I even check the spam folder, and frankly, the spam has been disappointing lately. So if you don’t have a We Tried to report, then by all means, go ahead and try to scam me. You can’t do a worse job than ravi8369870, who emailed me a month ago with the subject line: “Hello Sir/Mam, Your Invoice #1710829-7519 – Your Exclusive Offer.”

I don’t even know where to start with this one. Who puts their salutation in the subject line? Does the person sending me spam also end their texts, “Sincerely, ravi8369870?” Why use this greeting at all if you don’t know the gender of the person involved? Why not double check, just for funsies, how the word “ma’am” is spelled? And I love an exclusive offer as much as the next guy – that’s why I have 400 different credit cards in my wallet, $1.3 million in debt, and a raging case of sciatica – but even I know that invoice numbers are rarely hyphenated. Somehow, the body of the email turns out to be a phony customer service email from Amazon, which in this universe is headquartered in Roopville, Georgia (population: 218). Anyway, I’ve sent ravi8369870 my social security number. He didn’t ask for it, but he seems really bad at this, so I figured I’d try to help him out.