There’s no doubt Yoshinobu Yamamoto will get one of the top free agent contracts this offseason.
But just how high will it go?
As ESPN’s Jeff Passan noted Friday, the Japanese right-hander’s price appears to be headed upwards of the $200 million floor previously predicted.
With just about every big market team interested in the 25-year-old, a $250 million deal isn’t out of the question, according to Passan, which would mean the team that signs Yamamoto would have to add a posting fee of over $39 million to his Orix team in Japan.
It’s possible Yamamoto could end up with the second-highest contract for a starting pitcher (outside of the two-way dynamic of Shohei Ohtani) in history, behind only Gerrit Cole.
The Yankees and Mets are among the teams vying for Yamamoto’s services, as The Post’s Jon Heyman has reported and their competition figures to include free-spending teams like the Dodgers, Red Sox and Cubs, as well as San Francisco, Philadelphia and Arizona.
The frenzy surrounding Yamamoto is based on his unreal numbers coming out of Japan, where he has won the equivalent of the Japanese Cy Young award in each of the past three years, after leading Nippon Professional Baseball in wins, ERA and strikeouts in each of those seasons.
That resume trumps even Masahiro Tanaka’s before he signed his seven-year, $155 million deal — plus a $20 million posting fee — with the Yankees nearly a decade ago. At the time, it was the fifth-richest contract ever given to a pitcher.
The deadline for the signing team to submit terms on Yamamoto under the posting system is Jan. 4 at 5 p.m.
Ohtani, meanwhile, is a free agent for the first time in his major league career and could still score a contract of over $500 million, even after undergoing Tommy John surgery that will prevent him from pitching in 2024.
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