The most interesting bidding war of the offseason isn’t for Ohtani 

Yoshinobu Yamamoto, for now, is the best pitcher hardly any baseball fan in this country has ever seen.

But there’s a chance that -- at age 25 and having already won the Japanese version of the Cy Young Award (Sawamura) three straight times -- he might turn out to be as much of a difference-maker, or even more of one, than Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto might be for their new teams.

It is why Yamamoto -- even with a Cy Young Award winner like Blake Snell still very much available, or Jordan Montgomery, one of the pitching stars from last October -- has become the hottest guy in the world. It is also why the next big free-agent move -- his -- really might be as important to the 2024 season as Shohei to the Dodgers or Soto to the Yankees.

“All you need for a crazy bidding war,” a Hollywood friend once told me, “is two studios who want the same thing.”

If it comes down to money -- deferred or otherwise -- it’s easy to assume Yamamoto will end up with the Mets, given their recent history of running a high payroll and spending big on free-agent pitchers. Just last season, they spent more on players than any owner in history, even if all it bought them was fourth place in the end.

But there are more teams than the Mets prepared to bid for Yamamoto, on both coasts, which might make this as good a show in the end as the fight over Ohtani was -- even if the money won’t be as big.

There is one Hollywood studio involved, which means the Dodgers. The Yankees are very much involved, and it is a rare thing indeed when both New York teams are after the same high-profile free agent. The Giants, who went hard after Ohtani the way they went hard after Aaron Judge a year ago, are in play. So, too, we are told are the Red Sox. Their chairman, Tom Werner, has said the Sox will be going “full throttle” this offseason to get out of last place in the American League East.

• Latest on Yoshinobu Yamamoto

And why might one star pitcher matter this much? Because star pitchers still matter mightily in baseball, even at a time when innings pitched have declined for so many of them.

All you have to do is look at the World Series champion Rangers. As great as Corey Seager was in the postseason, winning another World Series MVP, and as crazy hot as Adolis García was before he got hurt, the Rangers could not have come close to winning the first Fall Classic in franchise history without the two aces at the top of their staff:

Nathan Eovaldi.

Jordan Montgomery.

The Rangers got Montgomery in a midseason trade with the Cardinals. But Eovaldi, a native Texan, was a free agent a year ago after leaving the Red Sox. All the Rangers did was make him one of the smartest free-agent pitching signings in recent baseball history: Two years, $34 million for a player who did as much to win them the World Series as Montgomery or Seager or García or Marcus Semien or anybody else. If you want to run the numbers, or just speculate about them, Yamamoto’s contract might end up being worth nearly 10 times what Eovaldi got over the next 10 years.

The Rangers won 14 postseason games on their way to winning it all. Eovaldi won five of them (after a 12-5 regular season shortened somewhat by injury), reaffirming his status as one of the elite October pitchers of his time. At some point this season, he will be rejoined in Bruce Bochy’s rotation by Jacob deGrom, on whom the Rangers did lavish a huge free-agent contract last winter before deGrom needed Tommy John surgery.

There are no guarantees with pitchers, of course. Ohtani won’t pitch for the Dodgers this season because he hurt his arm, and deGrom did get hurt last season. The Mets spent more than $80 million last season on Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander, and we all know how that came out, with two guys who no longer pitch for the Mets. And Snell and Gerrit Cole, the two Cy Young Award winners, pitched for teams that didn’t even make it to the postseason.

Who needs Yamamoto the most? The Mets do, for a couple of reasons. One is that the Yankees just swung that deal for Soto and the other is that owner Steve Cohen doesn’t want to be watching Yamamoto pitch across town for the next decade. The Yankees want him, because they think he can finally help put them back in the World Series.

And maybe, just maybe, the Red Sox need Yamamoto as much as anybody else because of an increasingly vocal and cranky fanbase and after another last-place finish, the team’s fifth in the past 10 seasons. You know what would indicate “full throttle” to Red Sox Nation? Yamamoto would, especially if the Sox beat out two New York teams and the Dodgers to get him.

Suddenly, with Ohtani in Dodger Blue and Soto in pinstripes, Yamamoto, the best pitcher many of us have never seen, is The One. It’s like they say in that commercial. Life comes at you fast, nowhere faster than in baseball right now.