We Tried Tracker: Winter Meetings Schwarblonso Edition

ORLANDO — Congratulations, everybody. We made it. It’s now Thursday, and the Winter Meetings have officially concluded. It’s time to reflect on the state of effort in Major League Baseball, and I am pleased to report that it is strong. At this time last year, we had seen 22 We Trieds (though a few more would be added retroactively due to a rule clarification). As of now, we’re sitting at 24, so let’s take a moment to congratulate all the agents, the anonymous sources, and the reporters who took us this far. As always, I invite you to peruse this vast bounty on the official We Tried Tracker.

Before we break down the last couple days, I should start with an important update on the most recent entry of this series. When news broke that the Giants asked for Tatsuya Imai’s medicals even though they didn’t plan on pursuing him, I gave it an intentionally cumbersome moniker: We’re Not Even Going To Try, So Don’t Bother Getting Your Hopes Up. This was a classic defense mechanism. I went with the big, long name to deflect from the fact that I couldn’t come up with a clever, pithy one. But the right name came to me this week. In the future, such a move will be known as a Pre-Tried. I have spoken.

Since that last update, Bob Nightengale took a new angle on this exercise, packaging the news that the Reds “were hoping to sign” Devin Williams with the news that they had actually re-signed Emilio Pagán. It’s a brilliant maneuver. You sign a lesser player while also announcing that you were also thinking even bigger. We Trieds are all about partial credit, but here are the Reds, breaking out the razzle dazzle and running an end-around in a bid for double credit!

This strategy is also something of a double-edged sword, though. Some fans might give the Reds the double credit they want, but it’s also easy to take the information in the other direction. The Reds held onto a good reliever, Reds fans! Let’s celebrate! Oh, also, they only got him because they tried and failed to get an even better reliever? Do you still want to celebrate? Try pulling that move with a child. Take them to an ice cream shop and get them a kid’s cone. Once they’ve given it a big lick and smiled their adorable little smile, lean over and say, “You know, I was hoping to get you a giant ice cream sundae, but you’ll have to settle for this little one because the New York Mets ordered it first.”

The bigger question is what it means that the Reds “were hoping to sign” Williams. That could mean anything from calling his agent and making a legitimate contract offer to catching a glimpse of Williams on MLB Network and briefly thinking, “There’s a fine pitcher,” before switching back to HGTV. Were they hoping to sign him in the sense that they actually tried to sign him, or were they hoping to sign him in the same way that I’m hoping to one day reach into my pocket and find a million dollars? We will probably never know.

The real fireworks started on Tuesday, when word broke that Kyle Schwarber would be staying in Philadelphia through his age-37 season. Not long after, Schwarber became the first premium player to receive only We Trieds that included (mostly) specific years and dollar amounts. No “in the mixes,” no “had interests.” Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic wrote that the Orioles had offered the same five years and $150 million that Schwarber received from the Phillies. In fact, Baltimore made that offer first, forcing Philadelphia to match it. Clearly Schwarber, knowing how much it costs to hire movers and buy those stupid cardboard armoires for your dress shirts, did the math and realized that the Phillies were effectively offering more money. Baltimore is great – have you ever tried a Berger cookie? – but moving is the worst.

Rosenthal didn’t stop there. He was on fire. He dropped three We Trieds in the first 100 words of the article. If this were a video game, he’d be on the cover doing a windmill dunk. He reported that the Reds offered five years and “in the $125 million range, with room to grow,” which I think we can all agree is a pretty good range to be in. Then again, it all depends on the tolerances that make up a “range.” Technically, my salary is also in the $125 million range, as long as your definition of a range is wide enough to mean “give or take $125 million.” Lastly, the Pirates offered four years and $120 million, which is adorable. Good for them. I’m sure it’ll be enough to satisfy the fans. After all, it’s the first time the Pirates have finished as high as third since 2013. Most importantly, Rosenthal knew exactly what he was doing. The lede of his article read: “The Baltimore Orioles’ failure to land Kyle Schwarber wasn’t for lack of trying.” In these trying times, that’s what a hero looks like.

The Orioles wouldn’t be left out for long, though. Later that night, Pete Alonso drove up to Orlando from his home in Tampa, entered the hotel through a side door, and took the service elevator up to the suite level to meet with teams that needed a power hitter. The move worked. On Wednesday, word broke that he’d agreed to head to Baltimore for $155 million over five years. Alonso must be a dynamite interviewee. When asked where he saw himself in five years, maybe he said, “Right back here, coming off five consecutive MVPs, asking you for another $155 million dollars.” You could tell that the move was a big one, because the first paragraph of Steve Adams’s article at MLB Trade Rumors credited four different writers on four different beats:

The Orioles missed out on Kyle Schwarber yesterday but are getting their big bat today, as ESPN’s Jeff Passan reports that they’re finalizing a five-year, $155MM deal with longtime Mets first baseman Pete Alonso. The agreement is in place with only a physical yet to be completed, Joel Sherman of the New York Post adds. There are no deferrals or opt-outs in the contract, per MassLive.com’s Chris Cotillo. Andy Kostka of the Baltimore Banner adds that Alonso receives a limited no-trade clause.

That’s how you spread out the scoops. One day we’ll get to the point where teams add superfluous tiny clauses into mega-contracts for the sole purpose of making sure that every single member of the BBWAA gets a piece of the action.

Exactly eight minutes after Passan broke the news, The Athletic’s Will Sammon got the important information out there in the most roundabout way possible: “The Mets had some interest in bringing Pete Alonso back but they were not comfortable going to the lengths and figures it ended up at in his deal with the Orioles, league sources said.” First, we need to address the “lengths and figures it ended up at.” Sounds an awful lot like the years and dollars, but maybe somebody considered it gauche to talk about money when… describing the terms of a contract? Sadly, Sammon used the same circumlocution in his article about the move. I was holding out hope that we’d get to read that the Mets were uncomfortable with the duration and the quantity, the longitude and the amplitude, the prolongation and the proportion.

Next, we need to address the “some interest” situation. We get a lot of “some interests” around these parts. That’s usually what you say when you weren’t all that interested. To wit, the Blue Jays “expressed some interest” in Raisel Iglesias. You wouldn’t think that phrasing would apply to the Mets and their all-time home run leader, but here we are. The Mets let Alonso take offers from other teams, then decided they weren’t interested in matching, and weren’t even interested in offering a lesser deal, just in case he might be willing take a bit less to stick with the only franchise he’d known over his 10-year career.

The Mets may not have been all that interested in keeping Alonso around, but after both that report and the reports that their offer to Edwin Díaz was for less than he’d signed for with the Dodgers, they were thirsty to control the story. Tim Healey of the Boston Globe wrote that the Mets have internally floated the possibility of platooning Jeff McNeil (who is not a first baseman and just had thoracic outlet surgery) and Paul Goldschmidt (who has continued to crushed lefties even at 38 years old) at first base. Someone in New York has clearly watched the “We can re-create him in the aggregate” scene from Moneyball way, way too many times. That night, Jon Heyman of the New York Post wrote about the situation, revealing that owner Steve Cohen texted him, “I totally understand the fans’ reaction. There is lots of offseason left to put a playoff team on the field.” Cohen is technically right; he still has time to spend money, and after he said that, we should expect him to do so. What I’m more interested in is the punctuation. It’s totally… normal. Cohen is known for his own disturbingly original take on the rules of grammar. He puts like five spaces around every period. He doesn’t think you need a period at all if the sentence ends on a line break. If you get rich enough, the rules no longer apply to you, and somehow, infuriatingly, that even extends to the rules of grammar, but look at that quote. The periods are in the right places. It contains no superfluous spaces. Even the apostrophe on the plural of fans is where it belongs! What the hell is going on here? Did New York’s reaction to letting Alonso walk finally scare Cohen straight?

Oh, and in case any of you were concerned, the Red Sox, the We Tried leader both during last offseason and at this summer’s trade deadline, finally got on the board. On Wednesday night, Heyman reported that the Red Sox and Cubs also met with Alonso. We didn’t hear much more about Chicago’s meeting, but Boston finally sounded like the team we know. According to Healey, the Sox offered “fewer years and significantly less money” than the Orioles, and they were deterred by Alonso’s advanced age. Even chief baseball officer Craig Breslow got in on the action, telling reporters, “Things don’t always line up.” What that means is anybody’s guess, but it’s considerably nicer than saying, “We weren’t about to pay that old guy real money.”

That just about wraps up this edition of the We Tried Tracker. As always, I encourage you to send me any We Trieds you may encounter out there in the wild world. You can DM me on Bluesky or email me at WeTriedTracker@gmail.com, a real email address that I really check. As such, I’d like to thank Ahrele for sending news about the Orioles’ showing interest in Dylan Cease, Max for sending the Rosenthal article, and Gavin for sending me an email just to say hi because he’d completed his English final early and had a bunch of time to kill before he could be excused. Lastly, acclaimed fantasy writer Xander Jon Dijk also deserves a special shoutout for sending me a delightfully disturbing short story about Bob Nutting’s attempts to banish a kraken from the bowels of PNC Park. As befits this exercise, Nutting didn’t try all that hard, and the Kraken remained a free agent.