SAN DIEGO — The Giants have been informed they are out of the Jon Lester sweepstakes, as the field is narrowing.
The Cubs and Red Sox are believed in, and possibly the mysterious Dodgers, as the sweepstakes come to a close.
The Cubs have been very aggresive from the start, and a couple of Cubs-connected people seemed somewhat confident, though the Giants were thought to be a favorite 24 hours ago and these things are very hard to predict.
The Cubs and Red Sox are known to have been in touch late Tuesday with Lester, as he gets closer to a decision. It isn’t known what’s going on with the Dodgers, but they’ve been seen for days as a long shot; they never met with Lester.
Lester himself called the Giants to inform them they aren’t in. “We did not receive a rose,” assistant GM Bobby Evans told Alex Pavlovic of the San Jose Mercury News, who broke the news.
Evans had suggested earlier in the day he felt the Giants were running behind the Red Sox and Cubs. Those are two teams with more personal connections to Lester, who played all but two months of his career in Boston and pitched for Cubs honchos Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer when they were with the Red Sox.
Evans had said earlier that they weren’t in the drivers seat but rather the back seat, adding that they’d hadn’t yet “been dropped off at the toll booth.”
Well, now they have.
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