Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2300: Our Favorite Offseason Transactions

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Mookie Betts’s unwanted weight loss, new Statcast data on batter positioning, and whether hitters should generally move back in the box, then recap Cal Raleigh’s extension and a smattering of other buzzer-beating transactions before discussing (35:46) some of their favorite moves of the offseason. Then (1:10:31) they talk […]

Vroom vroom, here's your primer. On Beef Boys, Baseball's End, Roger Angel, and Super Pretzels. Lilian's asked a deal, and Mike drought hypotheticals. Waiting for the perfect bat from a volcanic eruption. Ladies and gentlemen, the Effectively Wild introduction. Hello and welcome to episode 2300! Round number, new hundred! New high score!

Whoa! Uh, Effectively Wild, that's the name of our show. Our show is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I, me, Meg, and Meg Rowley, you are Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. I am losing my whole remaining mind. But here we are. Ben, how are you? How are you?

Well, I'm not mired in positional power ranking, so I'm relatively doing pretty well. And I'm excited for opening day week and the last day of spring training action. I am so close to being free and yet far but mostly close. I, with the great, careful, diligent work of my colleagues, am done editing the player piece of positional power ranking. So mini party woo woo woo for Meg, and also for the writers. They do their own hard work. I do a different kind of hard work,

made easier by their hard work, but still hard. But now I have to like remember how to calculate z-scores. So, you know, dark night ahead of me. The ultimate challenge. It's fine. It's no, it's not that bad. I know how to do it. I just have to like remember, you know, I have to remember in the sheet how to do it. I have to set up my formulas and then I have like a bunch of other stuff to do, but we're close.

We're getting there, Ben. We're circling for a landing sort of like this intro. Yeah, and sort of like this off season. And we're gonna kind of tie a bow on the off season today, sort of, by doing a little bit of off season review. And we're gonna talk about some of our favorite transactions of the off season. Moves, signings.

Yes. Those are the different ways one can acquire players. And rule five draft picks, don't leave those out. And waiver claims, and every now and then, sometimes just like a cash purchase, which always sounds very strange when you say that team X purchased person Y. And so we tend not to, but that is a transaction type. It's not one we dwell on at least, or just one we don't tend to describe that way. Cause this is yucky.

We should, we should move on from that. You know, I bet that's high on the list of priorities for the league right now given some of their other concerns. Yeah, I'm sure. Well, every now and then they do soften, massage some language in a welcome way, like injured list, for instance. These are good changes. Been done before. Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to talk to Davey Andrews of FanCrafts about teams that tried to make moves reportedly but did not complete those transactions. Davey's been doing the WeTried tracker, the

inaugural offseason. He's been keeping track every time a team is said to have tried to acquire a player after that player has been acquired by a different team. And then the sad news comes out that we were after him, we were in on him, we made an offer, whatever it is. Davies had been keeping a compendium of those moves. So we're gonna talk to him about them and also about what he has learned from this exercise. And just a couple of quick things before we do,

I guess, a good news out of Dodgerland, which is that Shohei Otani is resuming his progression to pitch, he will be throwing a bullpen session on Saturday and it's still gonna be a while, but it's a long-term play for Shohei's wellbeing is what Dave Roberts said. So they aren't really giving any sort of timeline on when he will actually be back

on the mound in a game, but he's on his way back to being back and that is good. And even better is that as we record this, at least on Tuesday afternoon, Mookie Betts is said to be scheduled to play on Tuesday, which is very welcome news because I've been worried about Mookie. I mean, Mookie's been going through it. If anyone has not followed the Mookie news. More like Pewkey. Yeah, very much like Pewkey news.

Yeah. I'm so sorry. I want to extend an apology to Mookie Betts and his family for that joke. Sorry. I mean, was it the most sensitive? Perhaps not. But when you have a perfect pun like that, just, uh, I can't blame you for, for seizing that opportunity.

And he has lost reportedly at least 18 pounds. That's shocking. I know as a percentage of his body weight, it's high. Cause he's a fairly slight fellow to begin with by big league baseball standards. And so he entered camp around 175 pounds and he's gotten down to like 157 because no, that is a low number for a major league baseball player because he hasn't been able to keep anything down. And so he has put it in these very frank terms that his body is just kind of consuming itself. I mean, it's, it's worrisome.

Like if this had continued to go on, he should have been like in a hospital. Like when I'm reading this stuff, I'm like, should you not be hooked up to an IV somewhere like getting fluids or intravenous nutrients. I mean, maybe he has been for all I know, like I'm sure he's getting good medical care. I certainly hope he is, but this struck just on the eve of the Tokyo series

and he made the flight and evidently it was like the worst flights of his life. And I guess we can all imagine why, but going from that, like airplanes don't come with enough barf bags for what he has gone through over the past couple of weeks. And so- That's worse than pukey, sorry.

Like that's a more- Maybe, yeah, it doesn't even have the clever wordplay to go along with it, but he's apparently been feeling fine lately, and yet when he eats, it comes right back up again. And hopefully that has stopped now because it got to the point of like, not even worried about when this guy will be back

on a baseball field, but like, are you okay? Like, is this a serious ailment that like could endanger your health and life? And hopefully this is under control now. And it was just some horrifically bad bug as opposed to some other longstanding issue. But that's the kind of thing that, I mean, he's very eager to get out there.

And he acknowledged that it might be a bit of an uphill battle for him, just on the heels of this ordeal that his body has been through to just start playing games again on the eve of opening day. I mean, that's something that has to affect your performance, like power wise. I mean, just like losing all of that. And I'm sure a lot of it is, is like fluid and water weight. And you know, probably he'll, he'll build that back up quickly hopefully if he's okay now and he'll be able to pack on some of those pounds, but some of it is probably

like muscle, you know, like good weight as the players sometimes say that he probably spent time over the off season maintaining or adding and then it's gone right before opening day. I just like, I hope he's okay and that it's really behind him. Listeners might remember that I got neuro virus right before opening day last year. Speaking of pukey, it is amazing how quickly you can drop weight in a concerning way. When you have one of those intestinal bugs, like it just, they wreck you, man. And you get, anyway,

I was about to say some gross stuff, so I'm gonna opt not to do that. I just, I'm glad to hear that it does sound like he's turning a corner. But yeah, like, Mega Bug, terrible. Like, bleh. That is really rough. I guess Mega Bug is what you had, but,

Mookie Bug. Ha! See, you got your word playin'. Yeah. Just under the wire, but Mookie. See, you got your word playing. Just under the wire. Yes. So this time, this very time last year, just percolating. I didn't even know. I didn't even know, Ben, you know, this time last year, I was like, I know what bad things could happen over the next 48 hours to interfere with my opening day.

No, I didn't. I didn't know, Ben. Well, we wish him the best. And yeah, some players they wear down over the course of the season and have trouble keeping weight on. And some players bulk up before the season with an eye toward, I know that some of this is just going to melt off me as the season proceeds.

Hopefully that's not the case with him because I guess he doesn't have a whole lot to lose. But yeah, that's, you case with him because I guess he doesn't have a whole lot to lose but yeah that's you're gonna need a certain sort of training plan and and nutrition plan like you got to enter a bulking phase as the season is starting essentially to have the strength to get through it so yeah our best to Mookie and also just wanted to highlight something Mike Petriello published at MLB.com based on some new baseball savant stat-cast data, which is about extreme batting stances,

which is something that we talked about just last week, last episode, even I think when we were talking about umpire punch-out calls. And I was saying that I think they're a little more standard these days, a little less pronounced. And I was likening that to batting stances getting a little less extreme than they used to be and maybe pitcher deliveries too, just all of it getting just a little more homogeneous. And Mike now and the Statcast crew can quantify extreme batting stances. And we know about the body tracking and the player tracking and the bat tracking and all of that so they have repurposed that to take a look at how players set up and where they set up. So where in the box, how far back, how close to the pitcher, how far from the plate, and then also

things like widest and narrowest stance like Stephen Kwan narrowestest stance, 8.8 inches. His legs are close together. And then Ryan McMahon, 45.3 inches. He's spread out. It's not like a Jeff Bagwell, but it's the closest that we come right now. And then also like open and closed stances. No surprise. Most open stance, Raphael Devers, most closed stance, John Carlos Stanton. That's one of the times when StocCast matches the eye test and you say, yeah, I guess we didn't really learn anything here because we kind of knew that if we've seen them,

but also this validates the findings of the computer. So this seems broadly accurate. And so when I read this, they also have stride length too, who has the largest strides. And I wished of course that we had this for past years. I'll invoke this again when we talk to Davey, but I wish that this existed prior to the past season or so, because then we could actually quantify whether stances have gotten less extreme and less varied over time. I was suggesting like people could, you know, write some software

that ingests old baseball broadcasts and they could use some computer vision kind of technique to break down the body positions and, and see whether there's less variability over time. And someone could still do that. We'll have you on Effectively Wild if you do that research, but, but it's nice to have it now, I guess. It's just that I wish we could look at this in a retrospective sense and say, how does this compare to the past? I love that you're like, go do this incredibly complicated thing for me,

why don't you? And your reward is you get to come tell us about it for a while. Yeah. I won't call that person Pukie unless they want me to. If their preferred nickname is Pukie, I don't know why it would be, but there's some weird nicknames out there.

There's Mookie. That's, I mean, if there's a Mookie, multiple Mookies, then why not a Pukey? I guess, you know, different connotations, but still. Well, yeah, cause one's about a Mookie and one is about puking. Exactly. Very different.

Important distinction. But Mike found, and I guess this isn't shocking, but there is quite a difference in where players set up in the box, not laterally, not side to side, but sort of the depth, how far back from the plate or where in the batter's box they are, how far from the front or back of it. in addition to not being the tallest player, also is the shallowest in where he sets up. So he's just 11.2 inches deep in the batter's box. So he's right up at the front basically. And then Matt Vierling was the deepest setup

and he's 37.2 inches deep. So like set up at the back line basically, like maybe his foot is almost on that thing. And Mike put it, if home plate were a perfect square without the two corners taking out, at be 17 inches on each side, Veerling is a home plate and a half deeper than Altuve is. And he made the interesting point that, you know, people talk about 60 feet, six inches as if that's some sort of sacred, inviolable length, even though it's not even like really a round number or anything. And it hasn't always been

that length. But also players are very different lengths because of where they set up in the box. And then also where they release the pitch, what their extension is as a pitcher. And that's a pretty big difference. Like when people talk about maybe they should move the mound back, when I talk about that, I'm talking about six inches a foot, like let's see how it goes. And there's already much more than that difference between hitters currently.

Do you think that that makes sense? Like, do you think they're doing it right? Do you think that both Vierling and Altuve have the right idea here for their individual skill sets and approaches at the plate? Or might one of them be better served by something different? Like, I'm so curious. I understand how stances can be very different and how that might make sense. And even your proximity to the plate, just are you Anthony Rizzo or, you know, are you someone who's way far away just based on what your strengths are as a hitter and where you like the ball and

what types of pitches you like to target. But the depth in the batter's box, I guess, again, like we've heard for years, maybe about players creeping up or creeping back and, and some players maybe do even based on the count, I guess, potentially. And you know, Mike found that generally there's not a lot of variability within individual players, but occasionally there someone might make a change mid season or something.

I don't know how often guys are making major differences within a single plate appearance, for instance, but do you think that Jose Altube and Matt Vierling are both in the perfect place for them? It does feel silly for me to suggest to Jose Altube that he's been hitting wrong this whole time. You know? Like, among the things that I feel comfortable doing, I don't know if that's on my list, could Matt Vierling improve at the plate?

I suppose so. You know, he had a 108 WRC plus in a full, basically a full season's worth of work last year. I don't know for those two specific guys. It does strike me as a potential variable to tinker with if you are struggling. I thought more about like sort of proximity to the plate versus other things. Rizzo's a counter example to what I'm about to say, but I tend to associate proximity to the plate with guess hitters more than I do. You look at Ty France, and I feel bad picking on Ty France, because he got hit by pitches a lot, and people were like, hey, stop hitting Ty France. And I'm like, well,

part of it is Ty France is real close, and then he's guessing. So I don't know if he knows he should get out of the way. So some of it is that. I real close and then he's guessing. So I don't know if he knows he should get out of the way. So some of it is that. I'm not making any sense, but you know what I mean, right? Yeah, just say yes. Just let me just let it go. It does strike me as a potential variable for adjustment if one is struggling. On the one hand, like you could see guys wanting to be further back in the box maybe because

they think it gives them more reaction time, but it's so little time. Does it actually, does it actually, you know, does it, it might literally, but does it meaningfully give you more time? Do you know the distinction I'm trying to draw makes sense here? I'm generally in the camp of, I think, moving the mound back, moving it farther away from hitters would help hitters. And I think that's just borne out by the few examples that we've seen, whether in ancient baseball history or in softball or elsewhere.

And it also just makes intuitive sense to me. And the half season or so when they tried this in the Atlantic League with other variables also going on, it wasn't conclusive. It didn't really sway me either way. So I still tend to believe that giving hitters a longer look at the pitch would help. There are others who say that it wouldn't, that actually if you have more distance and more time in the air, then that means more movement, more break. And I think that is true, but I also think that it enables the hitter to have more time to gauge that break. And so yeah, the pitch is gonna be dropping more,

but you just get a better read on that movement, on that drop, because the pitcher's not imparting new movement to it when it's already in route to the plate. And yeah, there might be knuckle balls or there might be seam shifted waker or other things like that. But most pitches I think are kind of moving more or less constantly after they are released. And so in my mind, just getting a longer look

and more reaction time benefits hitters. And so if I'm saying like, yeah, they should move the man back six inches or a foot to help hitters on the hole, then I should probably also be saying Jose Altuve is hurting himself here, despite the fact that he has had a fantastic career. He'd be even better if he just moved back a foot or more, which he has the real estate to do, because then he'd have even more reaction time. And so I guess it's hard for me to believe that it would ever be optimal to get closer

because like if you, if you took that to its logical or maybe illogical conclusion, if you're just like, well, if you want to get closer, what if we just removed the front part of the batter's box and you could get as close as you want, you could get right up next to the guy, but you wouldn't want to do that. Right. And so it would be hard to generate power that way. Yes, it would. And also you would get hit by every pitch and you wouldn't be able to have any reaction time whatsoever. Right. And so if you just sort of extrapolate like, okay, well you wouldn't want to be right in front of where he's releasing the pitch. So

then isn't farther back better all else being equal, but then maybe all else isn't equal. Right. And maybe it's, it's something like, well, let's say you are a fastball hitter. Maybe you want to get up close, then again, like fastball goes fast. And so maybe you would want to get farther back, but if there's less movement on the pitch, then maybe you just kind of scooch up and you can just make contact closer to it. Whereas if you're like a breaking ball hitter or if you're bad at breaking balls, maybe you would want to scooch up actually because then you wouldn't give it as much time to break.

Then they can't break as much. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, but even then you're costing yourself time to gauge the movement of the pitch and then for your neurons to fire, you have so little time to gauge the movement of the pitch and then for your neurons to fire, you have so little time as it is that I would think just every additional, like yes, it is an infinitesimal amount of extra time that you're adding, but as a percentage of the total time that you have, which is tiny, yeah, it's pretty meaningful at that point. So I feel like it could make a difference.

So just my blanket generic advice would be like, buy yourself all the time that you can have. Maybe it'll help. I mean, then, you know, maybe you'll get some catcher's interferences out of it too. It's one of those things where, yes, in general, I think more time is better. And to your point, I could see there being individual cases where the interaction of the batter's stance, his height, his lever length, the particular pitches he's seeing, all of those things might interact in a way that changes the answer slightly. But as a base case, I think that it would make sense to be farther back, farther, because it's a literal distance. I don't know about the in versus out piece of it.

I think you get sort of diminishing returns on both extremes, right? Because you might get hit by pitches more, but like you don't actually want to do that. It's a hard way to take your base. And again, it does seem to correlate somewhat with the guest hitter guys. And Altuve does not have long leavers as they say, short, compact swing. And so maybe for a short king. Yeah. He doesn't need quite as much time to get the bat on the ball, which clearly he has no problems doing like he's been quite successful,

but could he be even better? That would be if a team hired me as a hitting consultant. I just come in and be like, I think you should move back in the box. You know, I think just one size fits all. That'll be my it's like when teams have their like, we don't like cutters for some reason, so no one in our organization throws a cutter. And that sort of one size fits all philosophy tends to be silly because you actually want to tailor it to the individual, but not me.

I'd come in and I'd be like, squidge back a bit, you know, just get back a bit, buy yourself some time. And actually Mike wrote a separate piece focused on Pete Crowe Armstrong of the Cubs who had a pretty dramatic mid-season offensive turnaround last year. And that coincided with him moving about a foot farther back in the box. So in June, he was farther back in the box. So in June he was farther back than just 6% of hitters. In September he was farther back than 95% of hitters. And when he was asked about it this spring he said, I'm definitely trying to give myself a chance to be able to see

the baseball for as long as possible. I don't really know if I've found my most comfy spot in the box yet, but I think there's definitely something to being able to see the ball for as long as you possibly can, giving yourself time. It sounds elementary. And I guess most players have come to this conclusion too, because Crow Armstrong said, if I'm being honest, the dumbest way to explain it is, in the seventh inning of the game, there's an expletive massive hole in the back of the box. That's where most guys stand. So it was either like, I can scoot way too far up in the box and not worry about the hole, or I can just step where everybody else is stepping.

So most guys aren't way up at the front of the batter's box. The average, Mike said, is 28 inches behind the front edge of home plate, and most hitters are clustered within a few inches of that point. So I'm not saying I'm gonna start a move back in the box revolution here, but I think there's something to it, because on the whole, I generally subscribe to the idea that players know what they're doing. In many cases, much better than bloggers and podcasters. Just intuitively, experientially, they have a good feel for the

game, but not in all cases. They weren't positioning themselves optimally defensively. They weren't throwing particular pitches to the most advantageous locations. There was a lot of room for improvement in pitch selection. It was always establish the fastball, fastball dominant, throw the fastball low in the zone. Ted Williams, notwithstanding, a lot of players preached swinging down on the ball, level playing, plus all the tactical stuff, sacrifice, bunting, intentional walks, pitch outs, et cetera. There were a lot of cases where the received wisdom, conventional wisdom wasn't quite right. There was even another piece published by David Adler

at MLB.com who pointed out that Otani is so good because he can hit the ball deep in the zone. He can let it get really deep, which he can do because he's so strong and he has such good bat speed. Not everyone can do that. But if you want to compensate slightly for not having the physical skills of Shohei Otani, move back in the box a bit. Was there a correlation between distance in the box and player height? He did not note that, I don't think. But I wonder.

Because I do wonder if like you, maybe your instinct, if you are a shorter guy is to be further up in the box a little bit. Like maybe you're like, Oh, well, I got to close some of this distance. I don't know. Yeah. It just takes less time to get the bat around potentially. So you're a short King with a short swing. But I would say even so, even if it doesn't take you that long to get the best, just still

move back a bit. Yeah. I wasn't leveling an accusation against your instinct, Ben. I was just saying. Oh no, I know. I don't know what my vibe is either. You know, like I can hear your note and you haven't said it, but I can hear it. I can feel it.

And you know what? You're not wrong, but I don't know what we're doing right now. I can't believe you've waited. You've made me wait this long to talk about Cowralli. Yes, let's talk some transactions here. So we are going to talk about some of our favorites and it just so happens that one of your favorites just happened because there's been a flurry of last-minute buzzer beating transactions, which is often the case in the week of or before opening day. And so, you know, guys go down with injuries and then, oh, this guy's hanging around or, or one team releases someone and then another team snaps him up or, you know, it's just the Orioles

sign, Kyle Gibson. They're like, Oh, maybe we actually do need some starting pitching. And now all that's left is Kyle Gibson or the brave sign, Verdugo or, you know, Ian Anderson gets traded or, which I understand cause that's a very angels move. It's not someone who was good in 2019, but close 2020, 2021 close enough to be on the angels and the Braves, you know, they brought back Jesse Chavez, which it's not a season until the Braves have re-signed Jesse Chavez, who I'm sure will be great for them. I don't know.

I don't think they're allowed to start their season until he's in the org again. Why are you two even pussyfooting around with other potential partners here? Why even pretend that you're not bound to end up in each other's arms once again? I guess it's, you know, they're just, they're playing the field and then they find their way back to each other and Jesse Chavez pitches better for the Braves than he does for anyone else, which we have stat blasted about. So that warmed my heart to see him go back there again. Or Mitch Hanecker gets cut and sadder, but perhaps not totally surprising Mariners news or more flummoxing. There was the Nolan Jones trade, the Nolan Jones back to Cleveland for Tyler

Freeman trade, which that one, it seemed like that kind of got a rise out of Rockies fans who like they've been through so much. I got the sense that Rockies fans were frustrated even more so by just the general aimlessness of the Rockies. That move in particular, just like, hey, we actually put one over on a team that tends to be pretty well run and we got Nolan Jones and he was good for us. And I understand that he had a down year last year, but really like, why are we cutting bait on him for Freeman? Is this what we're doing here? He's one of the more promising players on the Rockies roster such as it is.

And so poor, long suffering Rockies fans. I feel like that one was, that was the straw that, uh, that broke their, their back, you know, much like Miles straw was for blue Jays fans when they acquired him, but it just felt like pushing them over the edge, haven't we been through enough and now you're trading away. Nolan Jones, seemingly for no reason, not even for like just trading from a strength to fill a weakness, like just a player that there's no acute need for more so than there was for Nolan Jones. That was flummoxing. Anyway, it's also extension season. And so we've seen extensions for Justin Martinez

and Jose Trevino and Tanner Bybee and Alejandro Kirk. And while we're getting a couple of catcher extensions, we also got one for Catcher Cal, who is now gonna be a Mariner, if not for life, then for a larger part of his life. Six years, 105 mil. Yeah, I wanna say two things. First, my general posture about transactions this year and whether or not they're good is do they happen before or after the positional power ranking for

that position runs and like how soon before or after because if it happens like a while before then it's just in the positional power rankings. Yeah. And an extension doesn't change anything for you. No, it doesn't. If it happens a day after, it's none of my business. Fundamentally, not my business, not my problem. I mean, the Nolan Jones one was pretty funny. I do wonder if Rocky's fans would have felt better if it had opened a pathway to playing time for Zach Veen,

but then they'd have to feel bad about the fact that I think it's fine that Zach Veen's in the minor, he needs some additional seasoning. So you sit there and you contemplate those things, right? You have to grapple with Ryan Yarbrough, one, not being a piece of cheese, and two, signing a deal with the Yankees the day that the reliever PPR is going live. You've got to incorporate him into the PPR, you go crazy. Then sometimes, you know, you're tired, the world is getting you down, you still have

so much to do before opening day, and then your Seattle Mariners extend Calralli and you can say unreservedly, unironically, without any snark, hey, good job Mariners. And so I say, after an off season of criticizing this baseball team, often rudely, I mean, I'll admit it was sometimes rude, Ben, I can say with no reservations, hey, good job Mariners, like good job. Because here's the thing about Cowarali, he's really good at baseball. He has exceeded my wildest expectations. You always knew or you suspected at least that the big dumper was going to hit for power. You don't get a nickname like the big dumper if you don't hit for power.

As an aside, the way that Cal has like kind of just leaned into that, right? Admirable, you know? People get to dislike their nicknames and request something else. I don't mean to say that they don't, but there's a certain kind of pro athlete who I think would have been fussy about that and embarrassed, but instead Cal has embraced it,

and now an entire region of the United States gets to yell, Big Dupper! And like joyfully. I have just a lot of admiration and respect for the way that Raleigh has refined his defensive game as he has moved up the minor league ladder, moved through the pro ranks, which is a really complete player. I don't think that he gets as much national attention as some of the other big name catchers. You have guys like Adley Rutchman who go 1-1 and are great. They're great the minute they hit the majors and are so great that when they have a down

half season, we all lose our minds. You have big name free agents, you have guys acquired in trade, but Cal was like, you know, Cal was a third rounder. He signed for less than a million dollars. He was not a super notable prospect for much of his prospectum and has just evolved into a guy who is, I think, pretty indispensable to this organization. And I think there was a lot of concern among Mariners fans that he would be, you know, one of the ones who got away. He was originally repped by Scott Boris, who as we have discussed is famously sort of antagonistic

toward pre-free agency extensions. He did change agencies, which I think probably played a role in getting this done. Do I think that the last two years of this deal are going to be great? I mean, they might not be. He's 28, you know, and a catcher, and he catches a lot, so you can worry about sort of physical wear and tear. I do think that, like, you know, we talk about the dumper, but he does seem to keep himself in shape. But this is a guy who insists on playing a lot. Like he played in 153 games last year and isn't someone who's like super

keen to take a DH day. He started 125 of those games. I think that it's reasonable to worry about the backend, even as we praise the backend, you know? I had to get that in there. I workshopped that joke a little bit with Craig. I think it's great. I think that if you're not going to spend big and free agency, if your model is going to be that you artificially cost constrain yourself and then largely rely on drafting and development.

One way to make good on that model for your organization and for your fans is to spend the money to keep your guys. Raleigh's a really important piece of this team now and will be for the foreseeable future. And that's a good thing. So good job Mariners. I'm glad that you took that Nintendo patch money, seem to be spending it on your dudes. I gotta say, can I offer a bias take on a thing that I don't tend to care about? That has to be one of the better sponsorship patches. Just cause like people like playing Nintendo and they don't

like Blue Cross Blue Shield or whatever the ****.. Yeah. Quick Crete, you know? Like, are people crazy about Quick Crete, you know? Quick, it does, it's kind of fun to say. Yes, people do have more positive associations with Nintendo typically than the standard sponsor for a baseball team. Yeah, it's true. And I think, yes, we've talked many times

about how when we've taken some teams to task for not acquiring people, we have said, well, another potential outlet for that money that you're not spending is to extend some guys. We've talked about with the Orioles, okay, if you're not going to break the bank and sign the top free agent, well, why not lock up some of this current court that you've had? Go make Gunner an Oriole for life. I mean, if you're Adley Rutchman, are you like, hey, so what the f*** though today? Is that your reaction? Sorry for the big swear with no warning.

But like, if you're Adley, are you sitting there going like, but so like, hey, where's my extension? Right, so we've certainly given the Mariners enough grief for inactivity and this doesn't take them off the hook for all of that. But if you are not going to make all those other moves, then you can at least ensure that you're keeping the dumper in town. You're, you're backing up the Brinks truck for the dump truck. And you got a back of the dump dump truck is the joke, Ben. Like that's the line. I guess, I guess I should have just, yeah, I made it. I overcomplicated it. Darn.

Anyway, next one. I'm so happy. I'm so happy about this. The other thing is that Cal has himself taken the team to task for an activity. He's been one of the more vocal guys on the team suggesting that they should be more active. So I guess good that that didn't cause enough bad blood

that got in the way of an extension here. And hopefully he will continue to advocate for that on the inside. And who knows, maybe he even felt them out about that. I mean, you'd think that's clearly important to him when committing for several years. I wonder whether he got any sort of assurances or? Yeah, me too.

That's a great question. You think that he would have brought that up at some point. Well, maybe he will be asked about that. Anyway, that's automatically one of your favorite moves of the off season. Oh yeah. And we'll just shout out a few others. This is nothing formal.

We're not drafting or anything. Nothing formal. But we- Don't have a brain for formal today. Typically do this at the end of an off season. Just a quick little recap of, I like that move. I did no deeper research than just looking at a list of somewhat noteworthy transactions and saying, oh yeah, that one, that one, I like that one, that was a good

one. And if it's a trade, that doesn't necessarily mean that one team won and the other lost. Sometimes they can both be winners or one can be kind of neutral and one can be a winner. And if we're praising an individual move, it doesn't necessarily mean that we loved the off season as a whole for that team. And I guess it also, if we don't shout out a particular team, it doesn't necessarily mean that we hated that team's winter. It's just that no individual transaction stood out. And I sort of skewed more towards not the most obvious, though I don't want

to be all like dollars per war here and, you know, just mentioned the obscure transactions be like, yeah, the Mets got one Soto, but I'm here to tell you that I like this transaction for this guy you forgot about. Like that's like a more obvious. Yeah, that's that's naming a breakout candidate for a guy who has already broken out. You know the biggest and best moves in terms of like the most transformative or momentous. I mean, you don't need us to tell you that signing Wonsoto was significant or signing Roki Sasaki for league minimum. Yeah, good move Dodgers. Well done on that one.

Or the Diamondback signing Corbin Burns. Like these are move Dodgers. So well done on that one. Or the diamond back signing Corbin Burns. Like these are great, obviously. Like well done on all of those. But yeah, you know that already. So that will almost go without saying, I suppose you can just kind of bake that into what we're talking about here. So I guess we can just alternate

and maybe we'll have some overlap, but what's that up to you? Kaitlin Luna Well, maybe I'll just stick in the catching world for a moment. I really liked, this is a smaller move, but I really liked the Rangers bringing in Kyle Higashioka. I don't have a really satisfying explanation for what went wrong with Jonah Heim last year, other than he needs to regrow the hair. But I think having a really good guy to pair him with from a catching perspective so that he can be off his feet a little bit more, it can't hurt for him to just have a slightly lighter workload. I think Higashioka is a respectable guy at the plate for the position. He's a fine defender. So I really liked that. It

felt like a good way for them to supplement a guy who they need a bounce back from with a complimentary partner in crime who hopefully will let him course correct and do a little less. So kind of course correct and do a little less. So, Kyle Higashiyoka, plus I get bonus points for praising a rival of my Seattle Mariners. I feel so much more confident saying that today than I did even yesterday. Yeah. These are like hipster picks, maybe sicko picks, you know, we're credited to like a- I'm not trying to be a sicko, I'm just saying. Yeah, well that's the way we're wired, but yeah. Like I also think that that market was just so scant and I guess like, you know, Travis Dernow, but like, I'm not going to be excited about Travis Dernow to the

angels in the same way. I'm glad for what that means for Logan to see I'm making another pick here, like Logan Oh, happy, but like who cares about the angels, you know, getting off, getting rid of all their Philly boys, the angels, you know, they got rid of all their Philly's former Philly's. I don't want anyone to interfere with Logan Ohapi's playing time because he's a personal favorite, but yeah, no, it was a, it's good when you, you have the perfect caddy or maybe more than that, but, but sometimes on a team where you don't need to dramatically remake

the roster, just bring it in that perfect complimentary player to fill that slot that you have. It's not the most important, but it's just putting the finishing touch on a roster. Like it's just the right fit of roster and player. That's very satisfying sometimes. So yeah, that's a good one. That's actually, that reminds me, the first thing I think I wrote for Grantland back in 2014, I guess, when I came on staff full-time, which was like around the trade deadline that year. And I wrote something inspired by the site, things fitting perfectly into other things. Get your mind out of the gutter. But it is a site that is, I think, inactive for a long time, but it was like a Tumblr maybe, and it was just about inanimate objects that didn't really

go together, but just fit perfectly. And there was something just very satisfying and Zen about it. And so I wrote about trade deadline fits from that perspective. Like here's a player who would just fit perfectly on this roster and sometimes that's very satisfying even if it's not a major move Okay, I will mention the Andres Jimenez trade from the Blue Jays perspective I like that one for the Blue Jays because they kind of took advantage of a salary dump Yeah, that was sort of what the Guardians were doing. They were big dumpers this winter from a salary perspective. Yeah, medium dumpers. By the way, wasn't there someone who was photoshopping the dumper to be bigger every day until Calralli

signed an extension? And then I think they gave up on that exercise earlier this off season, just a little too soon. But the dumper was like taking up the entire frame in the photos and they had to zoom out to the entire stadium to allow more space for the dumper was like taking up the entire frame in the photos and they had to zoom out to the entire stadium to allow more space for the dumper. Maybe they'll have a follow-up now that the extension was signed. But I liked the humanized trade because I think he is probably the best second baseman defensively in baseball.

And that kind of gives you a high floor as a player. And if he even bounces back offensively to what he was in 2023, I'm not saying 2022, but even 2023, he was just a really valuable player. Even last year, depending on your defensive metric, he was also a really valuable player and he didn't hit. So if he hits at all and the Blue Jays have this great defense already,

and so that further solidified things, and the Blue Jays have this great defense already, and so that further solidified things and they didn't really have to give up all that much to get him. And I'm not saying it was like the worst move of the off season for the Guardians. I mean, I get that they have guys who can fill in and maybe they'll be fine, but just taken in isolation, I thought that was a clear win for Toronto. And another one where we talked a lot about the Blue Jays not being able to sign their top free agent targets. And so if you're whiffing on free agents, then if you can make a trade and acquire talent

that way, then that's another route you can take. So the Guardians got him for minor leaguer, Nick Mitchell and Spencer Horwitz who was hurt, maybe more seriously than people thought, and also didn't really fit on Toronto's roster. So, and the guardians ended up flipping him to Pittsburgh. But yeah, that just felt to me like, and he signed for a while and not at an exorbitant cost. I mean,

maybe exorbitant for Cleveland, but not for Toronto and gives them some continuity because they do have a bunch of guys heading toward free agency. And he, at least as someone they can pencil in longer term, depending on how they restructure their roster, how the season goes. So gave them options and made them better in the short term. So Andres Semenes acquisition. Okay. I'll stay in the trade range then and say that I thought that the Yankees acquiring Cody Bellinger was a very good, yeah, very strong move.

You know, I think that we can feel pretty confident that his bat isn't going to burn as bright as it did in his really good bounce back year after the non-tender thing. But I think that like it's a, it's definitely a workable bat. I think it'll play well in that ballpark. And I think that, you know, it gives New York a good bit of positional versatility. It lets them play a real center fielder in center field. We've talked about how Judge sort of gamely tried and he wasn't bad out there, but he's not, he's not a center fielder.

I think I've been more down on his defense out there than you've been, but he fits better in a corner. It's amazing he fits anywhere because he's so tall, but of the places he fits, I think a corner of the outfield is one of them. And so it's good for the position on its own. It's good for what it allows them to do with the rest of their roster. So I really liked that move. I know that the last couple of weeks have been rough for Yankees fans.

And as we talked about in their team preview episode, our take on their offseason is obviously being colored by the pitching injuries lately, but I do think it is, it was to their credit that after losing out on Soto that they immediately pivoted to other places where they could make their roster better. Yep. So I thought that was good. Yeah. And a lefty in Yankee stadium, which they've had a real shortage of in recent years.

Like people have been like, Hey, you remember you're the Yankees. Right. You know where you play? Yeah. You make the rest of us watch that little league ballpark all the time. You may as well like make some work of it. So that did seem like a good fit for me. And yeah, just generally their response to losing Soto, which was a big blow, obviously, but then to recover from that as well as one could by getting Max Fried, Anne Bellinger and Devin Williams in quick succession. That eased the sting somewhat perhaps. And even Fernando Cruz, I like the Fernando Cruz trades that they made. So yeah, I liked a lot of their work, would have liked it more if they had

actually signed Juan Soto. But aside from that, I thought they did a nice job. Okay, I will take, I'll take two intertwined ones here and both also trades. First, I will take the Royals acquiring Jonathan India, which just- Interesting. Seemed like the kind of player they needed. And- It does, but that's so funny because I thought, which just seemed like the kind of player they needed.

It does, but that's so funny because I thought, I worry about how both of those guys are going to experience their new ballparks. Yeah, I'm sure Great American might not be quite as friendly a fit for Brady Singer as Kaufman was, but I think just India just being able to get on base, which is in short supply in the world and still is, but India helps and their leadoff hitters were just abysmally bad last year

and just did not get on base at all. And putting someone who can get on base ahead of Bobby Wood Jr. that's pretty big, I think. So they just sorely needed some on-base ability and if India stays healthy, then he's a good source of that. So I liked that, but then I also kind of liked the Reds acquisition of Gavin Lux.

So kind of like both ends of the second base, merry-go-round in Cincinnati. Now, I don't know exactly how the Reds will end up deploying Gavin Lux is the thing. And, you know, I guess he's like slotted in at third, but they've kind of talked about him as a utility player, multi-position guy. And I don't know how capable he is of that,

but just getting Gavin Lux's bat, I thought, without giving up all that much. I mean, they traded Mike Sirota, minor leaguer, and a draft pick to the Dodgers. It just, it felt to me like a case of the Dodgers have a surplus of talent, and the Reds just took advantage of that. By getting a guy who was a really good hitter

down the stretch last year, I was sort of surprised that the Dodgers actually moved on from him. I know they have so many players, but like middle infield isn't exactly their strongest defensively and depth wise. So it did sort of surprised me that they moved on from him and a guy who by Dodger standards these days is pretty young is just 27 years old. So I thought that was a pretty good pickup for the Reds to sort of see an opportunity and swoop in. Yeah, I think that that's right. There was a little bit of that across the league this offseason and I imagine

we're going to see more because not all of the other guys have options. So we're going to end up with some. I want, I'm working on a joke joke are you ready for my jokes that I'm working on? Are you ready for it? It's good when you announce the joke in advance. Yeah it's I'm workshopping it so you know we got a like bear with me here you know we got a so this would be a step down for him because he's a starter Brady Singer but okay okay here's the okay so the okay here I got it then are you ready so the Reds make the OK here, I got it. Are you ready? So the Reds make the postseason. That's step one.

And then in the postseason, like they are looking around. And you know how in the playoffs, sometimes teams are like, oh, you're not in our playoff rotation. You're going to shift to the bullpen. Right. You know how that happens. So that OK. So so Brady Singer is going to do that in my scenario with my joke. And then you could say, he's working late because he's Brady Singer. This is a Sabrina

Carpenter. I got to work on it still. The cadence isn't quite right to get his full name in there. A lot of Sabrina Carpenter on the podcast lately. He's working late, he's Brady's singer. You know? Okay. Yeah. All right. Okay.

It was a very famous song, Ben. Yeah. No, I'm with you. It was a joke. Because she's working late because she's a singer. Sometimes people have to sing in the middle of the afternoon though. You know? Yeah. True. Usually not. Like Brady's singer. Usually at concerts. Sometimes people are just sing in the middle of the afternoon though, you know, yeah true usually not a concert

He's Brady's They hit a dinger see see it's right there. Okay. Yeah, there's another run You know what? I should bother Davey about this cuz if anyone's gonna get it right It's Davey cuz he is both a musician and up and jokes than me. Not these kinds of jokes. He's a ringin'. But they don't want him to give up a dinger. Like if you're the Reds, if it's whoever, anyway.

Is it my turn to, am I supposed to be picking? Yes. I liked the Red Sox traded for Garrett Grochet. Yeah, that was a good one. I liked just a lot of their off-season moves. I mean, they were all pretty- Yeah, I liked the Red Sox off season just kind of generally. I thought they did a very-

Yeah, it was just, yeah, good job across the board. But all the major moves, Bregman, crochet, I thought, yeah. I thought that it was a good kind of competitive, it was a good competitive off season. Oh, you know, here's just an off season I liked in general. And look, are we pretending that this is purely them wanting to do it and not them being afraid of a grievance? No, we won't pretend that. We are clear-eyed about these things. But I really liked the A's offseason. I thought

that the A's offseason was good. Is it enough? No. Is them leaving Oakland still a crime? It is still a baseball crime. That is still a baseball crime that they made. But you know, I like that they gave money to some guys, right? I'm glad that friend of the pod, Brent Rooker is getting paid. I think that extending their young guys is smart. I think that they, you know, did a good job reinforcing that rotation. I know that their rotation to not great out well in the positional power rankings. It was a big woof in that respect. I'm kind of a woof, but I do think that it is a better group than it was.

Good for Lawrence Butler getting paid. I just, I think that they, they did, they did some good stuff here. And I think that they are in a place that if one were, if one were inclined to feel optimistic about the team on the field and the guys that they have coming up as potential reinforcement of that team, one could be allowed to feel good about it. Should you feel good about it's about this team's ownership group? Absolutely not. Do they still as an organization,

I think still have work to do from a development perspective, from the perspective of reinforcing their ops infrastructure? Yeah, I think that there's still a great deal of work to be done on that score. But if you are a fan of the athletics from wherever you might hail, there are guys on this club where you would be like,

I would buy that guy's jersey. And that hasn't been true always lately. It was often true in the past, in the recent past. And then we went through a fallow period and she had to put up the yellow on the wall. That's a reference to Homeland. I don't think that show probably holds up very well. But you know, Fallow Period, I don't know.

I'm just like a bunch of references and insanity at the moment. I think I can make that Brady Singer joke work. I think it can, it might be kind of mean to him though. And so maybe it's not good, but I think that there's a Sabrina Carpenter, Brady Singer joke to make. Somebody work on that. Keep us posted. Maybe, maybe he will date, uh, Sabrina Carpenter and make Bauman's bold prediction come true. I have no idea if Brady Singer is married or not. Neither do I. Let's find out.

By the way, I will remind everyone while I bring that up and while you're talking about the upside case for the A's who you boldly predicted could finish second in the AOS, go vote, go vote on our full predictions. You still have time until first pitch on opening day. Right, if you're in line to vote, stay in line. Yeah, hundreds of ballots have been cast, but Chris Hannell is hoping for hundreds more. So I will include the link on the show page again, go to ewstats.com and get your responses in and go listen to the Bold Predictions pod first, of course, but then get your votes in. Yeah. So I had the Rooker and Butler extensions also on my list just because if you've had as much upheaval as that organization has had and the lack

of continuity, geographically speaking, then it's good at least to give your future fans, whoever your fans are at this point, some sense of these guys are going to be A's. Wherever the A's are playing a few years from now, we can quasi count on them still employing just a couple of middle of the order mashers who were just, you know, a real like bash brothers combo down the stretch last year. So hopefully that keeps up and they will be as four years to come. I will also shout out, look, the Mets, obviously Soto was the big one, but I also liked the Clay Holmes signing. It wasn uh, you know, it wasn't like some of the more double bank shots. Let's convert this guy to the rotation and no one ever saw that coming.

And you know, maybe it's someone who works cheap, like homes got a significant deal, but if he turns out to be a very viable starter, and I think he has the repertoire to do that, then that'll probably be a bargain given what starting pitchers were going for this winter. So he does seem to have the stuff and the arsenal to make that work. And, you know, I guess worst case scenario, he becomes a good setup guy for you, right? So there's a fallback plan, but he seems to have the raw materials to work with. And we've, we've seen that work with a number of guys and we've talked about how it's just not as big a difference between starters and relievers as it

used to be, cause you don't have to go that deep into games as a starter. And the Mets need some, some arms in that rotation. So I thought that was maybe the most exciting of their moves there. And I guess I'll give them credit for the Pete Alonzo signing. The terms weren't quite what Pete wanted, but given the lack of demand for his services, I thought it was good for fans and I guess for both parties

that they ended up back together. I'm sure the Mets were more pleased with the terms than Alonzo was, but it just felt like those two should not move on from each other just yet. And he, even though they were talking a big game about not needing him, he certainly makes them better in the short term. And this is sort of a short term contract. So I thought it was a smart move for them and also just a very fan friendly move in

general that really raises their floor. So yeah, I liked that move. I liked them bringing back Sean Maniah, you know, I don't know that it will end up being as impactful. I know he's hurt right now. So we'll have to see what he looks like when he comes back from the injury list. I was less than two about the Frankie Montaz move, but I liked the man I move opening day

starter clay homes. How about that? But yeah, I thought, you know, they had a good off season separate from the Soto trade, even though I boldly predicted them to miss the postseason. I want people to know that I have not yet made my staff playoff and award predictions. My little treat as the person who puts that post together is that I don't have to do it By the deadline I get an extension. I granted it to myself And I will probably have the Mets in my playoff field so I know that that doesn't track and if you all want to include that as a

Piece of information as you rate the boldness of the prediction that feels only fair and I I do want to highlight it But is it because I don't have conviction in the boldness of the prediction, that feels only fair. And I, I do want to highlight it, but is it because I don't have conviction in the bold prediction or because I'm going to be bending to group think in my staff predictions? I don't know. It's a, you can issue a referendum against the prediction and me as a person, that's in your power as voters. Can I go again? Can I do it? Because I've thought of an actual transaction and not like a dumb joke that hasn't quite come together yet. It will come together though. And then it will be so funny. Please report back when it's polished to perfection. Yeah, when, when, not if, when. I, and I think I said this when we discussed

the signing at the time, but I just, I think that the way that the Tigers have executed their Jack Flaherty of it all over the last year, masterful to get a guy to have him contribute, get you some wins in the first half and then net two top 100 guys, get an everyday regular out of it. And then a guy who eventually might be an important catcher for you. And then to just be like, yeah, that guy's real and bring him back on a deal that isn't breaking the bank. I feel bad for Flaherty that he

didn't get more money, but like, you know, like good. That was a, it was a well executed sequence. Um, on the part of that for an office. I thought so too. I had him on my list and of course, teams might have been saying damaged goods about some part of his body potentially. And maybe that's why it worked out that way. And we'll see. And, and the Yankees said that at the deadline last year and then he held up fine for the Dodgers. So yeah, I thought that was good. And I was even gonna maybe mention the Gleiber signing for Detroit.

I thought that was sort of a bargain just again, the going rate, I think he's a fine player. And by that, I mean, he's fine, but like he's fine. He's fine. He's fine. And you know, they got him on a one year deal for not that much money. And they need a player like that and someone who can lengthen the lineup. So I don't love the Tigers offseason on the whole. I think they could have done more and they maybe needed to do a bit more as a hedge against regression.

But those two moves, I thought they took advantage of weak markets for a couple of key contributors for them potentially. And here's the other thing I'll say about it. I think that Gleiber, in addition to the fact that he might end up being a bargain, and we'll see, he has been quite good. He has been maddening to Yankees fans. And then you look at the way that he hit in the playoffs last year, that was encouraging.

His second half was dramatically better than his first. So there's all of that. He has to have the beard now. I guess he could have potentially had the beard anywhere, but now he gets to have the beard now, you know? I guess he could have potentially had the beard anywhere, but like now he gets to have a beard. But mostly, it can't be a bad signing. Like it just really can't. When you're in $15 million for an everyday position player, it just can't be a bad signing.

It's going to be, so there's, there's really only upside here. And that's very exciting. I agree with you. Like they could have done more. It felt like an off season that was very aware of the fact that they play in the AL Central. Like that was sort of the vibe that it had to me where they're like, you know, other clubs in this division are getting better. Obviously we were not the only playoff representative, but at the end of the day, it's still the

AL Central. So, you know, we're going to do some stuff and we are going to make some good moves, but we're not going to do anything spectacular. I do wonder if spectacular just isn't going to happen until they're out from under the bias deal. It's not like they've never spent money. They just haven't always done a great job of doing it. What else?

I guess the only really prominent moves that I still had on my list, I wanted to mention the Jesus Lizardo acquisition by the Phillies, which feels like it went under the radar a little bit. Maybe it's because of the timing. I know he's coming off a down year and an injured year, but if this had been a year earlier,

he would have been immensely valuable on the trade market. And it's like an embarrassment of riches for the Phillies in that rotation. Cause they've got Wheeler, Nola, Sanchez, which I've seen Christopher Sanchez showing up on a bunch of breakout lists. Get out of here with that. Okay. But, okay, but beyond that, so, so, hey, so, hey, I, we don't have to, we're not sad. We're not really getting the breakout thing, but beyond that, so hey, so hey, we don't have to, we're not, we're not really beginning the break out thing, but I, I'm going to say this, Christopher Sanchez this spring, he looks f**king great, man. He looks great and he's done so hard.

They have Sanchez and Suarez and Luzardo and Painter waiting in the wings, not to mention a spare Taiwan Walker lying around. Who they're going to need to lean on right away, yeah. Yeah, right. So I mean, I know we've- Yeah, Chris Horace is on the aisle to start the season. Everyone's obsessing over the Dodgers rotation and understandably so, but the Phileas rotation

is not far behind. They don't have like 12 guys who are good, but they have six or seven who are really good and the top of that rotation is as good as anyone. So just to add Jesus Osarro as your like nominal fifth starter. I mean, he could be, he could be one of the better pitchers in the league if he's healthy and holds up well.

So yeah, this was the first off season as we covered in our Phillies preview pod when they didn't make a multi-year free agent signing under Dombrowski, but they did go get Jesus. So that was a pretty big move. And I guess Kyle Tucker falls into the like Soto burns Sasaki. Yeah, obviously it's good to get Kyle Tucker. Yeah, it's not be obvious, but it is a good move. Yes. The cubs needed a superstar caliber player like that. And they got one in him. And then I wanted to mention jerks and Profar to the Graves. I thought that was a good move,

and I don't know exactly how good he'll be, and will he settle in somewhere between what he was last year and what he had been before that. And they're not paying him to replicate his performance from last season. So it's OK if he doesn't quite do that. Not that the underlying numbers didn't make it look like a mirage or anything, but it was just, you know, out of norm, out of line with what he had done since the years

when he was a tippy top prospect, but they had a need for him. Even after signing him, they went and got Verdugo. So it was kind of an acute need and they went and got him and got him for three years and 42 million, like not an exorbitant amount. So that was a good pickup, I thought. And then among the, well, I guess I was gonna mention Nick Pavetta for the Padres. Which just, it also felt like sort of an unsung, not a lot of buzz about it.

It was- Yeah, it's just never a bad idea to get more good pitching. Even if they don't trade CIS, right? Yeah. Darvish has hurt maybe. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And yeah, there was a lot of buzz and smoke about a King trade or a CIS trade or something. And even if they don't trade those guys,

they still, they need someone. And Pavel was like as a fourth starter, that's a really nice pickup. And I guess it was maybe the fact that he has been more promising than he has been consistently really productive or just the fact that it was kind of late in the off season or what, but it just, it didn't get a lot of shine and Padres had a pretty slow off season.

And I thought that was a nice cap to it. And even picking up Jose Iglesias on a minor league deal and now he made the roster. I thought that was a nifty little addition, late in the winter. And then in that category of just minor move, but still sort of good, I thought Hassan Kim going to the raise.

And I get that there's some uncertainty and coming back from shoulder injury and you never know. And he's probably gonna be out until late May at least. But if he comes back at that point, gives you even a half season or more of solid Hassan Kim production. And then it's a two year deal like, or, you know, it can be potentially, I know there's like opt outs and stuff, but you know, they didn't spend a whole lot. It's not high risk, even though his, his health might be. So I thought that was a nice little move. And, you know, even though the Orioles got grief from us with their lack of higher impact pitching

moves in isolation, I liked the Charlie Morton signing, just persuading Charlie Morton to come back for one more year and sign somewhere else. I enjoy Charlie Morton and he has defied the aging curve thus far. Yeah, it's, you know, they're great complimentary signings to an ace who they didn't sign. So like that piece of it just has to remain part of it. But you know, it was, yeah, you got to eat innings, you know, and they need them eaten more than ever. That sounded weird. Need them enough to go get Kyle Gibson's. So yes.

Hey, it's better than signing Patrick Corbin, I guess. Yeah, it's maybe. In that vein, I wanted to praise the Pirates. Yes, that's right. Extremely qualified limited praise, but I liked the Androhini signing. Oh, sure. Like that's as far as I'm going to go on the whole, the pirates definitely should have done more. That's yeah, it's about as far as I can. Yeah, exactly. But given the rest of their rotation

and all the young guns and now Jared Jones is a worrisome situation. But you know, at the time you thought, okay, we're going to have Jones, we're going to have Skeens, we're going to have Keller. Like we've got, you know, okay, we're going to have Jones, we're going to have skeins, we're going to have Keller, like we've, we've got, you know, other holdovers. And then we've also got Chandler and other prospects coming along and all these exciting homegrown guys. But let's just go get Andrew Heaney to be like back of the rotation guy insurance.

If someone does get hurt, if something happens to Jerry Jones's elbow, hey, we have Andrew Heaney. And it was, you know, one year low dollar deal, just the Bob Nutting favorite. And I thought that was a good like round out their rotation kind of move. And then finally, the only one that I had highlighted here that we haven't mentioned is the Nationals trading for Nathaniel Lowe. Oh yeah.

Which again, like I had almost forgotten that that happened. I don't even remember whether we brought that up on our nationals preview pods. I was like, oh yeah, they got Nathaniel Lowe. It happened. Maybe, I don't know. I don't remember. Usually pretty thorough.

I don't know what question I would have had if we had, but just a solid pickup. And you know, like what's going to make or break the nationals is the progress internally. It's going to be James Wood and Dylan Cruz and you know, like what's going to make or break the nationals is the progress internally. It's going to be James Wood and Dylan Cruz and you know, Abrams and Ruiz and all these guys, right? But to add an established veteran who is around for a couple of seasons in low and it happened during this time when there was a run on first baseman, it was a gold Schmidt and nailer and Santana. All these first base moves

were made and the Nationals got Nathaniel Lowe and they gave up Robert Garcia to get him. But still Nathaniel Lowe, solid guy, solid player. Yeah. I like that move. I also, this is more medium sized than small, but I liked the Jock Peterson signing for the Rangers. I think that he's just like a really solid hitter. I know that, you know, he's being shielded by, from the Platoon downside a lot and that happened last year, you know, but he's just a good, he's a solid hitter. And I think that, you know, it's not like they lack for thumpers in that lineup. They don't have a thumper, but they do have plenty of thumpers. But you know, they had sort of a swoon across their entire lineup last year.

Evan Carter's been optioned because he just looks really tentative this spring. I wonder if his back is still bothering him. But you know, so I think having some reinforcement there is useful and I like it. I liked that move. I thought it was good. Okay, well there's a non comprehensive, unranked list of some of our favorite moves

from this off season. And now we can take a quick break and we'll be back with Davy Andrews of FanGraphs to talk about what might have been or what realistically could not have been, but teams are still eager to tell you they tried, which could be everything ranging from the Reds trying to trade for Louise Robert Jr. to the Twins trying to acquire John Bertie. Yes, Minnesota, you may have missed out on John Bertie. We'll be back in

just a moment. He's a twin. He's a Canadian twin and he rakes until the lefty comes in. He won't swing. If it's out of the zone, that's one thing I just got to know. Edward Julian, are you going to rule again? Edward Julian, are you going to rule again? Alright, well we just discussed some moves that happened and now we're about to talk about some that didn't happen, but that someone tried to make happen, ostensibly, reportedly, supposedly, as tracked by our guest today. Now, I guess I should say that the WeTried tracker

is an actual tool, it's a spreadsheet, it's a thing that exists that you can look at, but it's also a person, the person who does the tracking. And so we are joined by the embodiment, the human embodiment of the WeTried tracker, Davy Andrews, who is a Fangraphs contributor and now a Fangraphs podcast contributor. Hello, Davy.

Hi, thank you. I never considered myself to be a tracker. Yeah, but you are. You do the tracking that is then preserved in the WeTried tracker. So you are also the tracker. It works on multiple levels. I don't know that I would call myself uniquely equipped to be a Tracker.

Well, you've had help. You're the hero who has risen to this moment though. You know, some, sometimes you don't know at the start of your day that that's what's going to be required of you. And yet here we are. Yeah. There's a very popular procedural on CBS called Tracker. It's just, it's one of these shows that like is one of the most watched shows in the country, but in certain circles, nobody has heard of it. And you're like, Tracker, yeah, you've heard of Tracker and you probably haven't heard of Tracker or seen it.

But it's a show about a survivalist and a tracker who works with law enforcement in exchange for rewards because of his tracking skills. So you're saying that you're not qualified to star in Tracker, but you are qualified to run the We Tried Tracker, which I have greatly enjoyed. And I've also just greatly enjoyed your work in general. And since this is your first time on the podcast, I figured maybe we could ask about your origin story. Because from my perspective, you just sort of sprang forth fully formed is your first time on the podcast. I figured maybe we could ask about your origin story.

Because from my perspective, you just sort of sprang forth fully formed all of a sudden as this kind of combination of reporting skills and keen insights and analytical chops and not graphs-style whimsy. And you've taken the baseball blogosphere by storm. So where did you come from? Oh, that I won't argue with you. That's very kind of you to say. I don't know. I mean, I'm just a creative person, I guess I would say. Like I was, you know, did comedy for many years and I've been a musician for a long time and, you know, always kind of writing in one way or another.

And so I just happened to get the chance to write for baseball prospectus and just was lucky to keep getting more chances to write really. And what have been your favorite things that you've worked on thus far? Because you've had a number of kind of classics, instant, instant classics, I would say. I mean, the thing I did a couple weeks ago where I wrote a poem about all of the new era, I can't even remember the name, the new era, overlap hats, I think they're called, that was very fun and exciting to do. And I don't know, I mean, Roger Cormier, who wrote for Fangraphs for a short while, and Sarah Ingber, the three

of us, did a project at Baseball Prospectus where we kind of memorialized all of the teams that got contracted in 2020 by the minor league teams. And so we wrote essays and I recorded a lot of music and Roger recorded some too and Sarah did artwork for all of them. And I don't know, that's kind of one of my favorite things that I've ever gotten to do. Yeah, it seems like one of your specialties is noticing something that is just kind of out there

in plain sight, but nobody pays particular attention to, and I guess that's something that we endeavor to do on this podcast as well, but I'm thinking specifically of say, your cleat cleaners obsession. Just the fact that there are cleat cleaners and they're out there and players use them and you might not notice and many people might not care. But I think you made them care and made me care. So tell us about cleat cleaners. Well, yeah, I think it was, I was working on an article about whether or not anyone had ever hit the ball

onto the Target logo on the back of the mound at Target Field. And so I just spent so long watching clips to see if anybody had done it, because you can only do so many stat-cast searches before you just have to click on that little camera button 1,000 times. And so when you stare at the back of the mound for so long, you start noticing what else

is there. And I realized that I didn't even know what the click cleaner was called. And I was like, that's got to be the only thing on a baseball field that I don't know the name of. And so I just started searching around and there was so little information. And very luckily, I reached, I was able to, I reached out to a couple of companies that make them and the people were very generous with their time. Because probably they're not just bombarded by requests to talk about the cleat cleaners. I guess

they're like, finally, we got one. You know, there's probably like someone who does PR for cleat cleaners and it's like, my job is justified. We got a media inquiry from FanGraphs about cleat cleaners and it's like my job is justified. We got a media inquiry from FanGraphs about cleat cleaners. It's a first. Right, I'd say that is one nice thing about my interests is that I'm generally not like if you're a beat writer you have to try to find a way to get Aaron Judge to say something slightly interesting every single day and you lose that battle every single day. But when you're writing about the cleat cleaner, these people were generally thrilled that anybody had noticed. And they invented their own because they thought this is a product that is great but that can be improved. They'd been working in grounds crews for decades. And it's just one of those things. And so

I ended up doing a search for the patents and I found the first cleat cleaner ever. And then months after that article came out, the daughter of the inventor reached out to me because she had been watching a game with a friend and she said, you know, my dad invented that. And the friend went, what are you talking about? You've never like they'd known each other for 50 years and she'd never even thought to bring it up. And so she Googled it and this article was the only hit.

And so she reached out and I got to talk to her and she remembered being a little girl and her dad made the first one out of literally toy rockets. From the little army men set, he stole his son's toy rockets and stuck them through a plank of wood and took it in the backyard to see if it got the money out of Kaleet's. I liked when you wondered about catchers scrunching themselves into tiny little balls. That has to be one of my favorites, the tiny ball scrunching. Yeah. Well, yeah, that one, I'm sure you remember, Meg.

I wrote that one on election day. I do not remember the timing of it because I've tried to excise that day as much as I can but yes I remember I remember posting it after as a potential bomb for folks. Yeah right but so the first draft was I would say twice as long because I wrote it throughout the day as a way to like relieve stress and tension as I was watching returns and all of this worry. And at a certain point you were like, once I put it in, you were like,

if it were still undecided, we might keep this, but I think this just needs to be a fun article now. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Are there regulations concerning the cleaners, like size or specifications, or is there a way to somehow use them to cheat to gain an unfair end of advantage? Will there be a scandal surrounding cleaners someday?

That is an amazing question that I should have asked. But I don't know. I was told by another follow up. I was told by one person that as they all the teams sort of have their preferences some teams like switch around brands, I assume they're just buying whatever's cheaper, they're trying new stuff. But some like the Yankees always use orange because it blends in well with the dirt. But like as especially like colleges and high schools are getting wilder colors and stuff, they're becoming popular. And so one person I spoke to said that if the colors continue to be popular, they were sure that MLB would crack down and say they all need becoming popular. And so one person I spoke to said that if the colors

continue to be popular, they were sure that MLB would crack down and say, they all need to be white because we need to be boring. Well, I suppose we should talk about the We Tried Tracker. And this is something that's been in the air that people have joked about instances of teams claiming that they tried or it being reported that a team had tried to sign someone and you decided to do something more rigorous

and actually jot down when one of these reports surfaces. So what was the impetus for this project? Well, I think I was telling my wife, as I often do, I have no idea what I'm gonna write about this week. Mm-hmm feeling and so I Said well, what do you have on your your list and I was like, well I have something about teams that you know They they say that they tried to sign a player when he signed somewhere else and it doesn't really make sense And and then all of a sudden I was just saying the whole idea out loud to her and she kind of went that that does

sound like an idea. Yeah, it's like on Seinfeld, it's like, this is the show, that's the show. Yeah, it's a show about nothing. It's a post about we tried. So yeah, it just started that way and I think even as I was like pitching it to Meg in Slack, it sort of took on depth and I was like, oh, we could create a tracker and oh, we could keep track of which players get the most and which teams and what are the weird phraseologies that get used and all that. It's sort of built organically into a monstrosity, I would say. Was there a particular try that first piqued your interest in this? Yes, it was.

I mean, the first one was about, it was Travis Darnow and Mark Topkin of the, is it the Tampa Bay Times? Darnow signed with the Angels, but he mentioned that the Rays were interested, but Darnow is from Southern California, so he just wanted to be home. And it was such a peculiar detail, and it was kind of the first we tried of the off-season. And I thought, well, it's nice for the the raise that not only do they get to say, well, we really tried, but we have a built-in excuse to it's not our fault.

And you, as Ben mentioned, have enlisted the help of others because too many tries to track on one's own, right? The internet is vast and team excuses are seemingly endless. So what has the process been like for people contributing their own tried tracking to your project and has there been like an ebb and a flow? Were you still receiving attempts and tips of attempts up through the winter months or did it kind of taper off as the bigger names went off the market? Oh yeah, it would definitely, when I would publish an update, people would remember it and reach back out. And then they would forget again.

So we haven't done one since February. So I think it's probably been a couple of weeks since I got a tip. But I did. If you see one and you don't see it on the track or to anybody listening, please reach out. I have replied to every single email and every single DM. And I welcome

sillier ones because a lot of people have reached out to tell me how their softball team tried to land Shohei Otani or whoever. Right. Well, so you had to decide what qualifies as an attempt that is worth being tracked, right? So we've talked a little bit about this on the podcast from time to time to just, you know, what clears that bar for this is like a legitimate attempt versus this is sort of silly or this is what someone just wanted out there to make themselves look good, but did they really try? So what qualifies for you? What had to be satisfied in terms of the conditions in order for you to add it to the tracker? Right. Well, so it's definitely a moving target because I think the essence of the We Tried is a team trying to get word out to the public that they tried.

And it doesn't necessarily matter if it's true. Like my favorite one through all of this is I stumbled on and interviewed Johnny Damon, went on a podcast and he talked about when he left the Red Sox and signed with the Yankees, the day after he signed with the Yankees, he got a DHL package overnight from the Red Sox with a contract in it, just so that they could say they tried,

even though they clearly sent it after he'd signed somewhere else, that way they could say publicly. So it's very much about the perception. So like there were during the winter meetings, AJ Preller on a video call with reporters from his suite at the Hilton and Attlee, he said that the Padres had been in on every single catcher who'd signed so far. Just a blanket. All of them.

Everyone. We were in on them. All of them. And at first I did not include that because it was just too bizarre. But I, last night as I was doing kind of the final tallies, I decided that absolutely meets the criteria. It was a team trying to get credit for making an attempt. And the Padres, I don't know if you recall this Meg, you've done a lot of positional power ranking in the last couple of weeks, but the Padres aren't dead last

in the catcher rankings because they don't have anybody and even the choices they made seem somewhat indefensible, but they, no team tried to get more catchers than the Padres according to the tracker. However, I didn't include Roki Sasaki because, one, so much of the information was out beforehand and the real point of the We Tried is that you're trying to get credit for it afterwards. But also it was just strange. We did learn a little details about the Padres had you Darvish at the meeting, we learned afterwards, and the Blue Jays had Bo Bichette and a couple other stars at their meetings.

So like we did learn the ways that teams tried to woo Sasaki, but it was such an odd thing that it didn't really make sense to me. You know, teams weren't talking about their offers or how competitive they were. Everyone was trying. Yeah, gosh, who knew that Kyle Higashioka would be such a load-bearing part of San Diego's playoffs? Oops, such an odd thing. I am curious, I think you're right to say that this is about external messaging, right?

They want to lend credence to the idea that they are trying to improve their rosters. But what is your sense of how many of them are sort of indicative of genuine efforts, right? That had they gotten a call back from the guy and he said, yeah, you know, I actually have always wanted to play in Cleveland, that they would have been like, great, we'll have a contract out to you tomorrow. You know, like there's the perception management piece of it, but just because they're trying to get credit doesn't mean that a genuine effort wasn't made. So do you have a sense of like what the split on that looks like? Well, with the caveat that I am not connected in any way, I think a huge percentage of them,

definitely not all like you'll notice that the Brewers are one of the teams that didn't have any, they had zero retries. And the other teams that had none just plain weren't trying. But the Brewers, even though they had serious financial constraints, were, you know, making deals, they were putting out efforts, I think they just kind of run a tight ship and don't have a lot of leaks. Yeah. But so I think it's some of both. My sense is most of these are real and people want and sure, I'm sure sometimes these aren't the best faith efforts, but I think people want their teams to know

that they're making an effort. They want to be credited for the work they're doing, even when it doesn't succeed. Yeah, I was going to ask whether there's a correlation between actual off-season activity and rumored or attempted activity, or whether it's even an inverse correlation. Is it that the teams that end up making the most moves

also attempted to make the most moves, which would make sense, right? Like if you're one of the more active teams, then you're probably talking to a lot of players you're in on many players. Whereas if you didn't make any moves and you weren't seriously pursuing anyone, then maybe you didn't actually try.

However, the incentives are flipped potentially to get that message out there. Because if you sign some of the top players, then you don't need to circulate the message that you tried over and above that, because your fans know that you tried, because you succeeded. But if you didn't succeed,

then it behooves you more to circulate that you tried. And so you weren't just sitting on your hands the entire winter. It was just that teams were rejecting your, your outreach. So I don't know whether you can quantify that in any way, but I wonder what your sense is of whether like more activity, actual successes correlates positively to more attempts like failed attempts or whether it's the other way around Well, I think there are a couple competing interests here, but the main answer I would say is yes, you know the teams that The AL East led the league by it had almost three times as many as the next division and you know we're talking about the the Red Sox who

Went out and signed a lot of people and the Blue Jays who made a lot of deals and the Yankees who made some deals certainly not all the ones they wanted to make and and We know that the Yankees tried to sign one so to a fray like exactly That's gonna get out one way or another. But yeah, I think there's also the opposite effect sometimes where when there are teams that have budget constraints for one reason or another and aren't out there trying to assign players, they just stay quiet and hope that nobody will notice them. So there are a lot of teams like that who just weren't really making an effort this season and just didn't want to draw attention to it by saying, oh yeah, we were really in on

this guy that you wouldn't want us to sign anyway. Yeah, because I guess on some level, conceding that you tried, that is an acknowledgement that you have a need, right? And so if you tried and you failed, then that means you have some sort of deficiency unless you subsequently filled it with some other players. So it's, it's acknowledging a weakness and then also maybe acknowledging that you have the means to make a move. That's the bigger one. Yeah. Right. Which, which can be reassuring. Like if you're the blue J's and they've had, I think a number of legitimate, we tried where they really were aggressively

pursuing someone and they were spurned and then they pivoted to someone else. And so you know that, okay, the Bujays are ready to mingle, right? Like they've got some money to spend. Or when the Yankees offer a fortune to Juan Soto and he takes an even bigger fortune from the Mets, well, then you know that the Yankees have some money to spend. Well, you also know that because they're the Yankees. But then they very quickly made that clear by making another flurry of moves. So if you're one of the teams that's determined to not spend, if you're, I don't know,

the Pirates or the Marlins or someone, you'd think that you'd be extra incentivized to say, we tried. Yeah, we were really just left and right trying to make moves. And somehow we came up empty every time. But then it does suggest that you had the capacity to make moves and thus your fans could maybe paradoxically be even more up in arms that you didn't spend that cash that you just had lying around. Right. If you're pretending that you're going to sign free agents and constantly crying wolf, people are going to notice in a hurry.

Yeah. I don't know whether you've done any reporting around this or whether you've talked to any of the people who report the WeTriids, because I'm always curious about the mechanism, because this is not the kind of reporting I do. I'm mostly not a news breaker. I'm not reporting that a team signed someone. I'm also not reporting that a team attempted

to sign someone but failed. But I'm always curious about how that happens. And, you know, this is probably a better question for a passenger or a Rosenthal or someone. Although I don't know that it's them that are doing the We Tried so much. It almost feels like maybe like a lower tier of Newsbreaker. It's like, if you're not breaking the big news.

Or it filters out to the beats, which I don't mean it. Like they aren't, you know, I don't, I'm not trying to tear the newsbreakers on like Ben Lindbergh who has a list. Nope, that would be judgment. I'm just saying if you're, yeah, if you're breaking the biggest signings, then it's like, you know, the scraps are falling to someone else. It's like who tried? Like I reported what actually happened.

You guys can report who tried and failed, I guess. Or yeah, maybe then the beats follow up on it. Or maybe it appears in a Rosenthal Notes column or something buried, you know, it's the 10th item in there because he's breaking so many other items. But I always wonder whether it is the reporters initiating this contact and saying like, hey, you in on anyone or maybe someone signs with a team and the beat writer follows up and says,

were you guys in on this guy or something? Or whether it is more transparently the team that is making that contact and reaching out to the reporter and saying, we tried, like, you know, just very transparently like, please tweet about the saying, we tried, like, you know, just very transparently, like, please tweet about the fact that we tried, you know, I don't know which way it works. I'm sure it's a bit of both. But I don't know whether you've cleaned anything about the mechanism or the process.

Right. I mean, I haven't spoken to anyone. I would love to. But I, there are there are a few things that I've definitely noticed. For one, you're right, I don't think I have 98 on the tracker right now and I don't think Jeff Passon is responsible for one of them However, other major newsbreakers like Ken Rosenthal has done a lot Like you said that he's not usually tweeting them out immediately, but he's putting them in in an article But then like Bob Nightingale John Heymanman, who are just scoop guys and who will post it. I did say a lower tier of news breaker.

That's kind of what I was getting at. Right. They're all over it. Or Joel Sherman is another one who just, they get it out there. And I suspect that that's because the way that they get information is so transactional there. And this is, you know, I don't know this for a fact, but I assume that when you're plugged in that way, you're constantly saying, I know this, what do you know? What can I run?

How can I give you something or what can you give me so that this relationship can continue in the future? There's plenty from beat writers too. But it's those are more often one offs like Mark Mark Topkin, that was the only one that I had from him, or Dan Hayes of The Athletic. Just mention a small comment about John Bertie, the twins. Their only entry was that they inquired about John Bertie. And clearly, I don't think that they leaked that to him so that he could launder it and make them look good. I just think it's a true thing that he learned

in the course of interacting with the team, so it made its way into a very small part of an article. And I didn't notice it until 4 a.m. last night when I was, you know, Googling it. Yeah, that's not gonna get your fan base excited. It's like, yeah, we didn't do much this offseason, but we did inquire about Don Bertie. Right, there are a lot of them that just smack of truth.

Like, nobody is, like, trying to. So there's that. Right. There are a lot of them that just smack of truth. Like nobody is trying to win the headlines with that. It's just a true thing that he learned and he's a good reporter, so he ran it. I think an underrated source for some of this stuff, honestly, is the agents. Because I think the agents will tell, you know, scoops men of various stripes, of different qualities, of different tiers. Again, Ben has a list. Come on, we all have a tier list in our heads of the newsbreakers.

The repertorial power rankings. Yeah, that's not, we don't have a positional power ranking for the newsbreakers. No, that's not true we don't have a positional power ranking for the data breakers. No, that's not true. Not officially. Not officially. It's on the back end. You got to be able to query the database for that one.

No, but I think that, you know, often agents who are in communication with the various scoops men will give those guys a sense of who they're talking to. And then that can be used to triangulate the trying later. You might text a GM being like, hey, here you're talking about da da da. And then they get confirmation that way because they've been fed some of the different potential tries by the agents. Yeah. Davey, did your tries come mostly from after the eventual transaction was actually completed? Like someone gets signed and then we hear a flurry

of this team was in on him too, or did many of them also come before any transaction was finalized where it's like team X was in the running or is in the running for this guy and then ultimately they didn't get that guy like does that count? It does not. This that's the most important criterion. This is only stuff that comes out after the fact. And so you're absolutely right that some of this is definitely coming from agents.

This is might be stuff that a reporter knew but didn't put out there until it was the deal was announced. There isn't really a way for me to know that, but I'm specifically looking for that stuff that, you know, there are a million ones that if we were including that, this would have been a much more robust list. There are plenty of teams that were in on any number of players, but they didn't, it wasn't newsworthy for whatever reason later. You know, nobody made a point of mentioning it.

Yeah, because I guess if you're an agent, then again, it behooves you to get that narrative out there before your client signs just to generate attention and make it seem like there's a bidding frenzy for John Bertie or whomever, right? But after the fact, there's a little less incentive to do that. Well, yeah, that doesn't mean that there's no incentive.

You know, I think we, I don't know if you remember a couple of weeks ago, maybe it was even less a couple of weeks, Juan Soto did an interview and a small excerpt was hyped way up because he said that the Mets weren't the team that gave him the most money. And it was, or that offered the most money. It was strange because we knew all the teams that were in it, and we knew almost all of their offers. But then the interview came out, and there was no more news about it. So he clearly didn't say, X team offered me more.

But then one of the most interesting ones was that Ken Rosenthal wrote an article about Carlos Santana. And it was just a nice article about his decision-making process. And he was just candid. And he's kind of the only player who's done this. He just talked about all the teams that made him an offer and kind of why he considered it and not, he didn't consider it. And, you know, like kind of what they were looking at. And so Carlos Santana has the most on the whole tracker With every team just looking to get this 40 year old guy for one more season for not that much money

Which is because he just I assume there are plenty of reasons for a player not to do it You don't want to anger a fan base You don't want to make a team that you might sign with in the future or get traded to in the future look bad But Carlos Santana has been around forever. He's not gonna to be around that much longer. He's, I think, pretty much beloved. He's the only Major League Baseball player who I have ever had to like scooch off of a surface so that I could sit there. Which is a weird thing to say, but uh, it was like a table and I kind of, it was like a was it it was just a table and i kind of it was like a you know an end table that i needed to sit on and he was very graciously moved and uh was this at the winter meetings or something or where was he sitting this was uh when i i uh get played that

song for the twins uh oh it's kind of the only place to sit and so he was just very friendly and he moved. It was very weird, all of it. But I think he kind of, it made sense for him to just be honest in this moment. But for most players, kind of there isn't a real incentive to do that. There are incentives and not to. And I don't think they're like trying to be secretive. I just think that he was in a position where it made sense and you know, he wasn't going to hurt anybody's feelings. I should have mentioned that before, that Davey's the creator of the Edward Julian, are you going to rule again song, which hopefully he is.

It sounds like he's going to make the rest or at least. Right. He murdered yesterday. So yeah, he may rule again. We will see. Well, I think it's just responsible beat writing sometimes to ask about these things because sure That's something that your readers and listeners would want to know if there was someone who seemed to fit your team's needs and you didn't sign that player. Then I think it's a good beat writing to go to the team and say, hey, were you pursuing this guy? And if not, why not? Now, I guess it would be good if you actually

do some reporting to follow up on that so that you don't just allow teams to claim that they were in on so and so if they really weren't. So maybe you reach out to the agents and you say, hey, this team said they were after this guy. Were they really? That would be good so that you're not just kind of laundering the reputation of a team,

or it's not just a sort of strict quid pro quo where it's like, I'll make you look good by publishing this little item here if you give me some other tidbit down the road. But there's an actual, I think, utility to that in some of those cases for the writer. But then the question then becomes how legitimate was the pursuit. And so you had to kind of categorize those and you ended up with many, many color coded categories, maybe more than you had bargained for. Many, many more. The terminology, I think is the best thing about this. And you've dropped a couple you've mentioned in on that's a big one.

We were in on that guy or inquired about. Now that's like, does that even count as trying like inquired on, you know, if you called and you say, hey, what's this guy looking for? And then they quote a number and you say, nope, too rich for our blood. Like that's not a try, you know, like that's, you made a phone call or you sent a text or something.

Okay, but that's not a try, you know, like that's, you made a phone call or you sent a text or something, okay, but that's not really an attempt. So did you have to set the bar somewhere for what qualified and then give us a sense of the many ways like the, the, we tried lingo that teams have deployed here. Cause another one is like discussed internally or like eyeing, you know, team is eyeing. Now that's before the signing usually, but still it's like, what does that mean?

Like they looked at their fan graphs page or something. We're all eyeing the top free agents in that case. Well, yeah, I think my favorite was, it was Pete Alonso. Who was it? The Yankees said they appreciated him. The Yankees said they appreciated him. Which I honestly have no idea what, I mean, who doesn't, if you don't appreciate Pete Alonso, get out of here. Yeah.

That's a funny one for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that like given how his off season unfolded and the way that his market sort of developed. I bet, well, maybe on some level, Pete Al Lonzo was like, I'm glad somebody does, man, because he's slowly out here. You could just imagine him being like, thanks, guys. Or show me the money, though, if you really appreciate it. Well, yeah, but you know. That's a good one.

So did that count? Does that count? There is no bar as long as you expressed any form of interest and that yeah, that absolutely could be, I'm sorry, I'm looking at the list right now. You know, we had conversations, internal conversations, or, you know, there there was a lot of I mean, the number one thing is just we were interested or we had interest. That was one way that I found the most of these is just Googling verbatim in quotes, the phrase had interest. And so that, that could be anything from, you know, we, we were in talks to just like, well, we thought about it and decided not to bother him.

We didn't have his agent's number and we weren't going to look it up. So you ended up with 98. What was the team distribution or you've mentioned a team that didn't have any, maybe you just had John Bertie, where there's some real... Or just had John Bertie. Were there some leaders, just the most prolific attempters other than, I guess, AJ Prellors, just blanket, we tried to get everyone. Right.

Which is pretty believable in AJ Prellors case. That pumped the Padres up to second. But yeah, but the the Red Sox, who definitely came in as the favorites, I think in December or January, Alex Spear from the Boston Globe wrote an article about how the Red Sox were the interest kings of baseball. And that's and I was actually just I'm writing a sort of wrap up for tomorrow. And that's something that I'm just I'm writing a sort of a wrap-up for tomorrow And that's something that I'm realizing as I look at it the teams at the top the Red Sox The Yankees were in second but more the the Blue Jays the Orioles and then the Cubs who are a little bit lower they're all kind of teams who were really trying to add and improve and With maybe you could exclude the Orioles from this but they all all did. They all went out and got players, whether it's through trades or free agency or both.

They really did make an effort, but they also lapped the field of interest. And I think it's because they're they had very strict parameters. The Red Sox really didn't want to go over a year for anybody. And, you know, they gave Bregman this weird contract with deferrals and opt outs. And they gave a two year contract to Sandoval because He's gonna be hurt for most of it. They really were trying to limit their long-term Commitments and the Orioles didn't actually seem like they were willing to spend money Even though they were talking a big game and the Blue Jays were really out there talking about how they wanted players

But they also kept talking about how rational they were being and And Ross Atkins, every time he spoke, he seemed to talk about subjective and objective reasons to like players and not like players. And so it seemed like they were working within really tight parameters of what they considered value and the production per dollar to be. And so they were sort of going after everybody, at least this is what it looked like to me, in the hopes that they would find one or two people who met their criteria, who fit into their narrow window of what they thought they were actually worth and how long they were willing to commit to them.

So that's just one pattern that I noticed that I really came away from. It seems like there are a lot of teams who want something very, very specific and they don't really care who they get it from, to some extent. Did you have any larger takeaways from this series, from this project? I don't know whether you plan to bring it back in future off-seasons, or anything you want to do differently now that you have one winter under your belt, but what were your insights? Well, I think the point was to come up with something ridiculous and by

that measure I succeeded. You did not only try. Yeah, I was definitely wildly successful in terms of that and I, you know, in terms of making the spreadsheet just look incomprehensible, I think another bullseye. But, I mean, mostly I think it was to try to have a fun framework to view the offseason and I think I bullseye. But mostly, I think it was to try to have a fun framework to view the offseason. And I think I did learn some things about how the teams operate and the way the media works. When you're combing, you find 100 of these.

You definitely see patterns in who's breaking the news and when it's coming out and whether it's coming out in articles or whether it's coming out in social media posts and that sort of stuff. But like so many things in baseball, there are so many factors complicating this stuff and it's hard to know. Like Meg was saying, did it come from a player or an agent or a team? Was it a leak or was it intentional?

There are so many weird things going on that it's hard to draw too many sweeping conclusions other than this game is insane. The next thing that I want tracked and various people have talked about doing this and I might know someone who is doing it but I do wonder like if it would be interesting to track the scoops men and the players they get scoops on and also the agents of those players. That is a really good idea for John Becker. But it might lead to consternation within the ranks. It might not be good for scoopsman morale. We might get scoopsman depression.

Yeah, it might lead Scoopsman depression. Yeah. Might lead to tears. Can you tell that I have like two working brain cells right now? And just the two they're firing off against each other and they're, they're going, Meg, we're not super pleased with your pod performance right now, but Dave is doing great. The other thing I think, and I always think this one, a new stat cast metric comes along, I think this is great. I love that we have this, but I wish we had a historical data set so that we had this.

I get greedy. It's like you give it to me for one year. I want it for every year in baseball history so that we can do these cross era comparisons. And so I wish we had the, we tried tracker. I need you to do just like a years long archival, just combing through old newspapers and microfilm. Were people doing We Tried back in the 19th century?

Were they saying this team tried to trade for this guy? I mean, there was no free agency, but you get the sense. You know, I want to know whether this has become more common, or less common, or whether this has just been a staple of baseball writing and reporting forever, which I sort of assume and from my own reading, I think it's probably the latter. But I would guess that just, you know, as social media proliferates, and just as there are more ways to get word on this out there and have it be visible that maybe it's just more salient than it used to be, but not necessarily a new trend potentially.

Right. It's definitely been around because one of the things that I was doing today is I was just like the White Sox don't have any, the Rockies don't have any. So I was just Googling all of the common phrases with those team names and like you'd see, oh, the Rockies tried for somebody? Oh, in 2016. Were there other, let's say not prominent players who got the we tried treatment? Who else other than John Bertie was in that category of like, this isn't really

going to get anyone very excited, even if it comes out. Right. I mean, I included Max Stasi because he signed a minor league deal as a catcher and AJ Preller said, all the catchers. I guess so, yeah. But yeah, I mean, there were like Andrew Kittredge got one and Randall Gritchick got the best. Randall Gritchick got the only true just we tried. That's right. tried because it was just Anne Rogers just just said Royals tried. That was the end of

the sentence, which is poetry. And I think really expresses the level of effort in trying to get a guy and not being able to be one year, two million with a three million buyout. But Gleyber Torres was tied with Santana with seven, which I definitely didn't see coming. But did they have the correct number of L's in Randall Grichick's name when they posted about it? Oh, that is a really good question that I don't remember the answer to. I think there was a typo somewhere else in the post, but not there. By the way, Anne Rogers is an excellent writer, and I really admire her work. Just I don't mean to pick on her anyway.

Yeah, no typos are always the fault of the editor, not the writer. There you go. Unless it's Twitter, I guess, in which case you are both. Speaking of which, I think I owe you an apology, Meg, about the positional power rankings. No, you don't. You super don't. You super do not. Good to know. Okay, well, I'm glad that the Royals tried to get Randall Gritchick, and sorry, they didn't succeed. Maybe they were just looking for Randall with two L's and ended up with the wrong guy. Exactly. It explains it. They were like, we only are in the business of two L'd Randall's. See,

now I feel compelled to double check that I'm not misremembering. No, it's just the one L. Okay, phew. People get that wrong a lot. Not at FanGraphs. We never get it wrong. We always get that right. Well, it has been a pleasure to read you and to follow your work with the We Tried Tracker and just all the rest of it, really. You've been a gift to baseball writing, and I hope that that gift keeps giving. And hope we can have you on again sometime.

But this was a fun idea. Thanks for doing a lot of the legwork, as well as all the crowd-sourced assistance that pitched in. Thank you very much for having me. How can people reach you by the way if they have any late additions to the We Tried Tracker? Well, so you can DM me on bluesky and my name there is just Davy Andrews Davy or you can email me at wetriedtracker at.gmail.com, which is a real email address that I have open right now, and I even check the spam filter religiously.

All right. Well, we'll link to all the existing entries, and if you can fill in any gaps, then email Davey. But no prank emails about your beer league team that tried to acquire someone. Those are encouraged. Okay. Well, breaking news, Davy informed me after we recorded that he has found a 99th example of a team trying.

It's a mention in a John Heyman New York Post column that the Blue Jays were an alternative for Pete Alonso. It was widely reported that they were talking to him, but this was the only one that came out afterward. So put it on the board, number 99, the Blue Jays were a quote, alternative for Pete Alonso. So I guess if we want to be pedantic about it and when don't we, you could say that probably

almost every team was an alternative for Pete Alonso if he was willing to lower his price enough. If he'd said he'd play for league minimum, then probably a lot of teams would have put their hands up and said, sure, we'll take you Pete. But I guess the point is that the Blue Jays actually did put their hands up and made some sort of pursuit. So there, the We Tried tracker is a living document.

Two responses to a listener email that we discussed on our previous episode. Jason George, Patreon supporter says, just listening to your bit about nuisance challenges at the end of the game, and you were discussing how an incorrect challenge could result in starting the next game's first batter with a strike against them. This is something a listener suggested to cut down on frivolous challenges at the end of the game that maybe there could be a strike assessed if a challenge was deemed to be frivolous. Jason says, I think the natural punishment is starting the next game down a challenge. If you have a successful challenge, you retain it, but if you're wrong, you'll lose it. And obviously that punishment doesn't matter at the end of a game.

I think that should just carry into the next game. And only if the pitch is incorrect by a certain margin, so is clearly to be a nuisance. I don't like the strike part, but saying, hey, you were a jerk yesterday, so now you only get one challenge today, feels like a totally appropriate consequence for stopping the cinematic moment

that we can get at the end of victories. That is a much more palatable suggestion. Thank you, Jason. Also, David responds in episode 2299, you guys discussed examples of something that happens in one game having an impact on a future game. This was in response to a listener email about a possible way to prevent frivolous last out challenges. One example of a game event impacting another game is Two-Leg Fixtures, popular in soccer only these days to my knowledge In a two leg series the two participating teams each hosts a home game and the winner is determined by the combined scoring of the two games Therefore one team can and often does start a game down by any number of goals on TV

They'll show two scores the score of the current game and the aggregate score Wikipedia has some other examples of aggregate scoring. A current use of this scoring method, which for some reason makes me strangely angry, is the UEFA Champions League knockout stages. Have a best of three series, for crying out loud. I know we've answered listener emails about determining the winners of baseball series

via run differential, or cumulative run totals over the course of the series, something along those lines. And hey, if you wanna hear me talk about other sports and also some baseball, we did an opening day preview segment this week. You can catch me on Slate's Hang Up and Listen. Still doing that every Monday. Hope you'll tune in.

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Aaron Boddy, Duke Hill, Laura, Kate Shrike, and Hannah Bennett, thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, personalized messages, autographed books, potential podcast appearances, discounts on merch and ad-free fan crafts, memberships, and so much more,

check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash effectively wild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email, send your questions, comments, intro, and outro themes to podcast at fangraphs.com. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild

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Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with another episode soon. Remember to cast your bold predictions ballots. Talk to you next time. Effectively wild, it's the only show I knew. Remember to cast your bold predictions ballots, talk to you next time! Oh, hey, oh, Tony. Or my trout with three marks. I love when I press record right before you make some strange sound so that the first thing preserved for Shane is, mmm. I'm so sorry, Shane.

Oh no, oh no, oh no, okay.