I miss the old internet. This is to say that I miss when the internet wasn’t anything and everything all of the time, but something you merely dipped your toes into every now and again. It was spending a small part of your week geeking out on some obscure subject that no one in your real life cared about. It was curating a list of blogspot sites and then flipping through them for a leisurely hour, like they were the sections of Sunday paper, and then forgetting about them for the next three days. It was saying to a friend, “oh man, you gotta check this out,” and then navigating to a website that consisted of nothing more than Sean Connery saying “you’re the man now, dog!” on a loop. The old internet was a hobby that was merely a part of how you lived, rather than how you lived, period. It was low-stakes and fun, as life’s most resilient pleasures usually are.
I recently found a tiny piece of online ephemera that reminds me of the old internet in some of the best ways, and because it’s the season of giving, I’m going to share it with you. It’s the We Tried Tracker, by FanGraphs contributing writer Davy Andrews and it is simply this: a chart that tracks which MLB teams claimed to have tried to sign a particular free agent after that free agent signed somewhere else.
That’s it! There’s no fancy website, just a Google spreadsheet a few accompanying blog posts. It doesn’t serve any greater purpose; it doesn’t ask for my money; it doesn’t demand I get outraged about something that doesn’t actually impact my life in anyway. It’s just the work of a bunch of baseball fans finding some fun in the offseason drama.
And guess what: as of this moment, the Red Sox are the stars of the We Tried Tracker! Of the eight significant free agents who have already signed and been included on the tracker, the Red Sox have been reported to have “been in on” five of them: Blake Snell, Yusei Kikuchi, Shane Bieber, Clay Holmes, and, naturally, Juan Soto. In second place are the Orioles, who’ve been attached to three names, followed by the Yankees at two.
The methodology at use here is, suffice to say, flawed. It relies first on a team’s attempt to sign a player being leaked to the press, and then someone in Andrews’ army of Try-Trackers to see the report and email it in. But that’s fine. Remember: we just trying to have some goofy fun on the internet here, not finalize a unified theory of Red Sox front office behavior.
We’re going to check in on the tracker every few weeks during the offseason. We’re not going to do it obsessively, but just when we feel like it, because that’s the ideal way the internet should be used. Hopefully, by the time that pitchers and catchers report, it’ll be something to laugh at, because hopefully by then the Red Sox will have done a lot more than “be in” on a bunch of dudes. But as of now, no, you are not imagining it: the Red Sox really are the interest kings of free agency.