Let’s check in on the We Tried Tracker
Last month, we introduced you to the We Tried Tracker, a fun little project on FanGraphs that tracks which teams tried and failed to sign significant free agents (or to trade for openly marketed players, like Garrett Crochet). At that time, only eight significant free agents had signed with any teams, but the Red Sox had been involved with five of them, making them — by far — the interest kings of free agency up to that point in the offseason.
Here we are a month and a half later now, and 26 significant free agents and/or trade targets have moved on the market. And, would you look at that, the Red Sox are still the interest kings of free agency. The Sox have expressed interest in but ultimately did not acquire 12 of the 26 players:
Blake Snell
Yusei Kikuchi
Shane Bieber
Clay Holmes
Juan Soto
Max Fried
Nate Eovaldi
Gleyber Torres
Chris Martin
Tanner Scott
Jeff Hoffman
AJ Minter
To put this into context: the Blue Jays and Orioles are tied for second on the tracker, but each of those teams was only linked to six players. The Sox are lapping the interest kings field.
When we first introduced the tracker to you, we noted that it isn’t really a serious endeavor. This is evident in a number of ways, from the fact that the tracker doesn’t yet include players like Anthony Santander or Teoscar Hernandez (free agents who have signed with the Blue Jays and Dodgers, respectively) to the fact that it doesn’t include every player who moved via trade, even ones I would deem significant, like Jonathan India (traded from the Reds to the Royals) and Jeffrey Springs (traded from the Rays to the A’s).
As the crew at FanGraphs notes, the We Tried Tracker — which is based on media reports, which themselves are usually sourced from team officials — monitors PR efforts as much as it does actual team building efforts. MLB front offices want you to think they made genuine attempts at signing and trading for a number of players, because MLB front offices want you to think winning is their primary goal, even though, for many teams around the league, it plainly is not. So, in that respect, we don’t really know if the Red Sox really are the interest kings of the 2024-25 offseason (i.e. we can’t say for sure that they’ve attempted to sign more players than any other team) but we know that they certainly want us to think that they are.