Edited to remove some of the histrionics, but I do want to push against the narrative that L.A. was the only place YY really wanted to play; that is only supposition based on his taking the Cohen's offer back to the Dodgers to meet. That only tells us that he would rather play for the Dodgers than the Mets at the same price.
If you want to make a supposition, I think it's much more fair to assume that he wanted to set the record for the largest pitching contract, which he did. There you at least have the evidence that the Yankees were willing to go to a higher AAV, but still feel $24M short of trumping Cole's deal (which I'll leave to
@jon abbey to weigh in on if that would cause clubhouse friction).
We don't even know how the negotiations were structured, but it appears that they were very highly formalized, with team meetings in L.A. without contract figures being exchanged (and despite breathless media reports telling us how much teams were offering). For all we know, it was meetings with the understanding that the team would present its best offer, without an auction element. Sure, YY took that back to the Dodgers, but for the Sox that leaves them on the outside looking in and we haven't yet seen a corroborated leak as to what their offer was from a reporter in Boston...
... and this brings us to suppositions about the Sox and YY's feelings about playing in Boston. The team met with him in L.A. and we're mostly assuming that he didn't come to Boston it's because he didn't want to play here for whatever reason. (Cora's wry "read between the lines" comments and smile seemed to be designed to give the "I want to believe (in the FO)" crowd something to hang on to, but other than dinner with Steve Cohen I don't know how much we really know about YY's trip the the East Coast.) But it could simply be that the Sox weren't going to make a competitive bid that topped the market for a pitcher, and that really does seem a lot more like JWH's style. $300M spread over 12 years wouldn't warrant a trip to look at Fenway in December amid the other bids he was receiving. The lack of leaks is striking here as it's neither in the player,'s agent's, or team's interest to have a lowball offer come out, and the only leaks to final offers were seeing are ones that are comparable to what he signed in some way. IMO those are the teams that can say "YY didn't want to play here." I don't think the Sox FO even met this criteria.
This attempt to land YY looks a lot like the negotiations with X, in that the team is willing to spend
a lot, but they probably only want the player on a deal that is "rational", if not downright team friendly.