We Tried Tracker Update: Modest Edition

A lot has happened since we launched the 2026 version of the We Tried tracker a few weeks ago. With the Winter Meetings about to kick off, we’ve seen 14 We Trieds from 10 different teams concerning eight different free agents. (As always, you can keep track of them all at this link.) That may sound like a lot this early in free agency, but it’s worth noting that 10 of our Top 50 free agents are already off the board (though three of those players accepted the qualifying offer, which means nobody had the chance to try). I suspect we’re a bit behind last year’s pace. Hopefully more news about teams’ pursuits will leak out in the coming months. The big number we’re shooting for here is 100: Last year, the offseason closed with 99 We Trieds. Let’s make it to triple digits!

More will certainly come. Raisel Iglesias is currently leading the pack with four We Trieds, but don’t be surprised if Ryan Helsley overtakes him. Multiple reports said that fully half the teams in the league were interested in Helsley, but we only have two actual We Trieds so far, and one came from Helsley himself. Helsley told reporters that the Tigers were particularly interested in signing him as a starting pitcher, which isn’t a surprise, but his phrasing was particularly fun. He said the Tigers were “in on me heavy.” Honestly, I don’t have any jokes here. It’s just a slightly odd grammatical construction that I will probably think about twice a day for the next few years of my life. Before this week, you could be in on something. You could maybe even be heavily in on it. But now you can be in on it…heavy. Sometimes language evolves just like lifeforms, one mutation at a time.

We have to head to San Francisco next, because that’s where things are weirdest. It started on Saturday, when ESPN’s Buster Olney reported that although the Giants have been linked to Tatsuya Imai, “a lot of their market pitching inquiries have been for more modestly priced arms — a strong indication they aren’t chasing the highest priced pitchers, like Imai.” That news sent the word “modest” bouncing all over the baseball ecosphere. Two days later, Andrew Baggerly of The Athletic wrote an article that confirmed Olney’s report and added a lot more color. One thing it kept front and center was the phraseology:

According to club sources, because of a number of financial considerations, the Giants do not anticipate making the nine-figure investment required to sign Imai — or any of the other top pitchers on the free-agent market. Instead, the club is focusing on more modestly priced alternatives.

That’s not very encouraging. It wasn’t even December yet, free agency had barely gotten going, and club sources (plural!) were reaching out to reporters (plural!) to make sure the fans had the word “modest” stomped into their skulls. The Giants won’t even be pursuing the pitcher who came out and said publicly that he’d like nothing better than to take down their arch-rival. It’s the extremely rare We’re Not Even Going To Try, So Don’t Bother Getting Your Hopes Up. Will we create a tracker for this? Depends on how many other teams jump on the bandwagon.

Baggerly’s article also contained San Francisco’s first We Tried of the offseason, and as you’d expect, it was bizarre:

Earlier this month at the GM Meetings in Las Vegas, Giants president Buster Posey, GM Zack Minasian and newly hired manager Tony Vitello met face-to-face with Imai’s agent, Scott Boras. They requested medical reports on Imai as well as fellow Boras Corp. clients Ranger Suárez, Max Scherzer and Dylan Cease, the latter of whom just signed a seven-year, $210 million contract with the Toronto Blue Jays.

But sources say the Giants were never prepared to enter the bidding anywhere near what Cease received from the defending American League champions.

So that’s definitely a We Tried. Baggerly reported well after the fact that the Giants asked for the medicals of a player who signed elsewhere. Plenty of teams earn a We Tried simply for doing nothing more than mentioning to a reporter that they were thinking about a particular player. But in the same breath, he made it clear that the Giants were never actually considering signing Cease. It almost sounds like they asked for the medicals because it would’ve been rude not to ask for them. You don’t want to anger Scott Boras. What if it triggers a flame war, and he’s constantly out there in the press burning you with the world’s worst puns? If not for that time last year when the A’s were actively refuting reports that they tried to sign particular players, this might be the weakest We Tried we’ve seen yet. It’s still one of the weirdest, though. I’m not going to sign this guy, but I would like to see an MRI of his elbow just for fun.

As everyone debated what exactly “modest” might mean, Timothy Jackson of Baseball Prospectus wrote an extremely measured breakdown of the situation. He didn’t fault the Giants for a reasonable fear of getting weighed down by a long-term deal at the game’s most volatile position, noting “the issue isn’t the path they’re plotting but the messaging that is and can be built around it.” He explained why the current state of the game leads teams down this particular path, and he dived into what modest might mean in terms of this particular free agent market. One of the six targets he mentioned was Cody Ponce, who came in at no. 40 on our Top 50 Free Agents ranking with a prediction of three years and $24 million from Ben Clemens. MLB Trade Rumors had Ponce at two years and $22 million. That very night, word got out that Ponce had signed with the Blue Jays for three years and $30 million. It was a bigger contract than expected, but the AAV was still lower than MLBTR’s prediction. Shortly after the deal, Baggerly earned San Francisco its second We Tried, writing, “Giants were involved but market got beyond them.” Whatever your definition of “modest,” it’s time to dial it down. The other pitchers Jackson lumped into that category were either ahead of Ponce in the rankings – likely making them too expensive for the Giants – or not exciting enough to be ranked at all.

Over in the AL, we have yet to get a single We Tried from last year’s runaway leader both in the offseason and at the deadline, the Red Sox. It’s starting to look like they won’t make it a three-peat. Trading for Sonny Gray and Johan Oviedo will likely leave them out of the starting pitching market altogether, and because they had one of the best bullpens in the game this year, they may not be going after relievers too hard either. They’re looking for a right-handed impact bat, but there just aren’t that many of them to choose from. Lastly, with their surfeit of outfielders (even after trading away Jhostynxon Garcia in the Oviedo deal), they may well continue adding through trades rather than free agency. Put it all together, and this Red Sox team just might not be that thirsty. All the same, I don’t want to count them out. They’re definitely not going to sit around and do nothing for the next three months, and even if they do think their roster is mostly settled, their history of racking up We Trieds on players they were only casually interested in predates this exercise by many years. Let’s not sleep on the Sox.

As we head into the Winter Meetings, the team that’s winning the We Tried battle is also the team that’s signed the biggest free agents. The Blue Jays landed Cease and Ponce, and they racked up reliever We Trieds on Iglesias, Helsley, and Phil Maton. Now reports have Kyle Tucker touring their Dunedin spring training facility. The Jays made it to the World Series, and they’re really going for it. It’s fun to see, even if it turns this ever-so-slightly cynical exercise on its head for a little bit.

In that spirit of celebration, let’s enjoy the many forms that We Trieds can take. On Wednesday, Mark Feinsand of MLB.com reported that Anthony Kay signed with the White Sox even though he had more lucrative offers to return Japan. As currently constituted, the tracker is unable to handle this sort of report. All the same, it’s important to acknowledge this kind of international bridge-building, so I am hereby awarding an honorary We Tried to the entire nation of Japan. Omedetou!

As always, I’ll sign off with a plea for your help in locating We Trieds out in the wild. If you see one, tell me about it! This time, my plea is slightly more desperate, because the more We Trieds I get from all of you, the less time I have to spend wading through the AI slop that pervades the internet these days. Please, support your local beat writers and help me escape the slop. I don’t have the shoes for it. On that note, I send my heartfelt thanks to Sam Horton, the first contributor of the season, for alerting me to the news about Iglesias, and to Sara for noting the Blue Jays/Helsley news. To join their ranks, you can DM me on Bluesky or email me at WeTriedTracker@gmail.com, a real email address that I really check. And I’m sad to report that for the first time ever, I haven’t received any spam emails there. Not a single one, and it bums me out. How is it even possible that an email address I post on the internet every few weeks isn’t getting any spam, while I get five texts a week from political candidates in a state I haven’t lived in since 2002? So even if you don’t have a We Tried to report, please go ahead and try to sell me something, anything. I’m so lonely.