What is Yoshinobu Yamamoto's plan for free agent meetings?

Right-hander Yoshinobu Yamamoto has been officially free to negotiate with MLB clubs since Tuesday, when the Orix Buffaloes posted the star pitcher. 

The free agent courtship process looks to begin in earnest next week, as SNY’s Andy Martino reported on how Yamamoto and his representatives at Wasserman will approach the decision of picking the righty’s new team.

The first stage is a round of phone calls and Zoom meetings with all of the interested teams. Yamamoto is then expected to arrive in the United States for a series of in-person meetings and further negotiations with however many finalists make this second and presumably last stage of talks. 

The timeline for these in-person sitdowns is after baseball’s Winter Meetings (Dec. 4-7), which will allow teams a better sense of the pitching market if some other top hurlers are signed or traded in the interim, and allows Yamamoto’s camp that same knowledge as well as perhaps extra negotiating leverage, if remaining suitors are even more desperate for pitching.

Though Yamamoto’s posting window extends until Jan. 4, it “is not expected to require that much time” for the right-hander to decide on a contract, Martino writes. 

Obviously there’s a lot of fluidity in this timeline depending on how many teams makes Yamamoto’s in-person shortlist and what types of offers end up on the table, but it would tentatively seem like he might have his decision made sometime between mid-December and Christmas Day.

Landing Yamamoto would undoubtedly make for a merry holiday season for any team or fanbase, given all of the hype that has surrounded the 25-year-old’s impending arrival in Major League Baseball. With a 1.82 ERA and a long list of accolades amassed over his seven seasons with the Buffaloes, Yamamoto is one of the most intriguing players to ever make the jump from NPB to MLB, as well as something of a unique free agent in general due to his young age. 

It is widely anticipated that Yamamoto will earn at least $200M in his contract (MLBTR projects a nine-year, $225M deal), and agent Joel Wolfe said earlier this week that 11-14 teams had already been in touch within the first day of Yamamoto’s posting.

Martino also adds a clarification to a statement made by Wolfe earlier in the week, as the agent told Japanese media during a conference call that his client would have no problem playing with another Japanese player. 

Due to a translation error, this was incorrectly interpreted as Wolfe saying that Yamamoto was prioritizing teams that already had at least one Japanese player on the roster, which isn’t the case.