The Boston Red Sox, Kansas City Royals and New York Mets have agreed to a three-way trade that will send outfielder Andrew Benintendi from Fenway to K.C., sources told ESPN’s Jeff Passan on Wednesday night.

Royals outfield prospect Khalil Lee will go to the Mets, while Royals outfielder Franchy Cordero will go to the Red Sox, with other players involved as well, sources told ESPN.

Benintendi, once a part of the Red Sox’s vaunted outfield core, missed most of the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, landing on the injured list Aug. 12 because of a strained right rib cage, with Boston later ruling him out for the year.

It’s not that long ago the 2015 Red Sox first-rounder seemed like a certain bet for stardom. Baseball America ranked him the No. 1 prospect in the game entering 2017, with scouts falling out of their chairs over his skill set.

At that time, one American League evaluator envisioned him as a center fielder who would win multiple batting titles, an eight- to 10-time All-Star whom he ranked alongside Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, and Mookie Betts as one of the best minor leaguers he’d seen.

“He’s a once-in-a-decade hitter,” said the scout.

A National League evaluator gave Benintendi an “80” grade as a hitter on the 20-80 scouting scale, and suggested he would regularly deliver 70-80 extra-base hits a year. Such projections didn’t seem out of place for a player who’d won every college award imaginable as a sophomore at Arkansas and was not fazed by blitzing to the big leagues in just over a year.

So what does the 2020 season mean? What does it say that, in a year when he was limited to just 14 games before a season-ending rib injury, Benintendi hit .103 (second-worst among the 414 players who had at least 50 plate appearances), slugged .128 (easily the worst in the majors), struck out in 32.7 percent of plate appearances (the 89th percentile), and when he did put the ball in play, did little except for pulling ground balls?