On Tuesday, Giancarlo Stanton’s agent told The Standard-Times that had the team expressed more interest in his client, they would have considered Boston as a possible destination.
“Oh, of course, yeah,” said Joel Wolfe, Stanton’s agent. “I don’t know what the Marlins said to them, but I can’t imagine that they would’ve said, ‘Hey he doesn’t want to go there, so don’t bother.’ We said, ‘These are our preferences, but we’ll listen to what you have to say.’”
Instead, the feared slugger ended up being traded to the New York Yankees. Regardless of their involvement, Boston didn’t make the list of preferred teams, which included the New York Yankees, Houston Astros, Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs. Why?
“I don’t really know,” Wolfe said. “Because, like I was saying, the list kind of morphed over time. And then at the end, it was the four (League Championship Series) finishers just based on the way he was looking at them. That was a lot of it
. But then I think some of it was, ‘Well, I don’t think they would want me anyway just because look at the makeup of their team and the studs they have in the outfield.’ That’s the way we looked at it.”
So when it came to creating Stanton’s list, he and Wolfe wrote off Boston simply based on the outfield, which features Mookie Betts, Jackie Bradley Jr and Andrew Benintendi.
“We said there’s no way they would want to be in on him just given the quality of the outfielders,” Wolfe said. “They already had those guys are under salary control. So it didn’t seem like it would make sense. And then when we asked the Marlins, they said no, the Red Sox were not in on him.”
Following Stanton’s introductory press conference on Monday, Wolfe expressed that the Red Sox were “never presented to us as an option” and that they “were prioritizing pitching.”
Red Sox Prisdent of Baseball Operations Dave Dombrowski denied having told Wolfe pitching was a top priority, though relief pitching wasn’t out of the question, which Stanton’s agent — who is also Brandon Morrow and Yu Darvish’s representative — did discuss with the team.
“I had called them about Brandon Morrow and at the time they were not interested,” Wolfe told The Standard-Times. “They didn’t need any right-handed pitching because of (Craig) Kimbrel, Joe Kelly. And then (I called) about Darvish, at the time, they have pretty good front of the rotation starters. And they were talking about some more middle or left-handed relief pitching at the time. That’s when it popped into my head. I was working on maybe two hours sleep and a lot going on. So that’s when it went into my head.”
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/sports/20171212/agent-giancarlo-stanton-would-have-considered-boston-if-red-sox-had-shown-more-interest