Report: Red Sox have spoken to the agents of all top free agent starters

There’s still plenty of time for the Red Sox to add the starting pitcher that new chief baseball officer Craig Breslow covets, and it appears that they’ve already done their due diligence on all of them.

According to The Athletic’s Jen McCaffrey, the Red Sox have spoken to the agents of each of the best free agent starters in this year’s class.

“A team source indicated that at this point the Red Sox have had talks with agents of all of the top free-agent starters and know what their markets look like,” McCaffrey wrote.

This, of course, does not guarantee that they will sign one of these talented starters, nor does it necessarily mean that they’ve decided they want to look elsewhere to find one. It just means that they’ve at least expressed some level of interest in these top free agents.

Some of these free agent starters in this year’s class have already come off the board. Aaron Nola is staying put in Philadelphia and Sonny Gray is heading to the St. Louis Cardinals. Kyle Gibson, Lance Lynn and Kenta Maeda have also signed new deals.

But there’s still plenty of talent left, especially at the top. It was revealed that the Red Sox had already spoken to the agents of World Series winner Jordan Montgomery during the Winter Meetings. National League Cy Young winner Blake Snell was determined to be among the best fits for the Red Sox by former MLB general manager Jim Bowden. The Red Sox have been linked to two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani and they could welcome Eduardo Rodriguez back to Boston.

But perhaps the biggest prize for any team in need of a pitcher this offseason is Orix Buffaloes superstar Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The 25-year old flamethrower finished his season by winning the Sawamura Award (Nippon Professional Baseball’s equivalent to the Cy Young Award), the Triple Crown and the Pacific League MVP, all of which he won for the third straight season. He’s widely considered to be one of the best pitchers in the world, and the Red Sox are far from the only team with interest in signing him.

“This is by far the player with the most interested teams that I have ever seen at the beginning of free agency,” Yamamoto’s agent Joel Wolfe said to Japanese reporters a week ago (h/t McCaffrey). “It’s what we call a perfect storm, where you have one of the finest young pitchers in the world who also is just 25 years old. It’s generational. Something like this only happens once every 10 or 15 years.”

Yamamoto’s destination will likely not be clear for a little while. Andy Martino of SNY said that the starter plans on meeting with teams over Zoom during the Winter Meetings, which are from Dec. 4 to Dec. 7. He will probably make his decision at some point after those meetings take place, and he has until Jan. 4 — 45 days until after his posting date — to do so.