The Boston Red Sox explored the possibility of trading Jon Lester to the Kansas City Royals this past offseason in a deal that would have brought back Wil Myers.
Instead, Kansas City dealt Myers to the Tampa Bay Rays for James Shields and others.
"You obviously hear it. You get the phone calls and texts from people about it. [Royals manager Ned Yost] is actually a pretty good friend of mine. I flat-out called him one day and was like, 'Hey, what do you got on this?' He said, 'Yeah, we're trying to make it work.' I just said, 'OK,'" Lester said.
"At the end of the day, it's a game. You enjoy doing it. But when it comes down to it, it's a business. You have to understand that. You can't take it personal. Nothing that [GM Ben Cherington] has done or that [former Red Sox GM Theo Epstein] has done in the past have I ever taken personal. That's just kind of the nature of what we do. You can't come into spring training with a chip on your shoulder and say, '[Expletive], they tried to trade me,' sulk and complain about it. It is what it is. You can't worry about it. If it went through and I was a Kansas City Royal, then I would have done the same things over there that I've done here for the past seven years, try to win games."