The Boston Globe’s Gordon Edes and Chris Snow report the Red Sox are about to appoint the duo of Jed Hoyer and Ben Cherington as the club’s new co-General Managers, and intend to offer Theo Epstein a consulting role.

Since Epstein’s departure, Larry Lucchino, the team’s president and chief executive officer, has conducted the search for a new GM and had appeared to focus on Jim Beattie, the former Orioles executive vice president, as his leading candidate. Beattie had at least three interviews for the position, but said yesterday he had not spoken with the Sox in a week.

The impending appointment of Hoyer, 32, and Cherington, 31, who spoke at length yesterday with John Henry and Tom Werner, could indicate a split among the Sox owners, with Lucchino possibly preferring to go in another direction. In addition to Jim Beattie, Lucchino is known to have spoken with two senior advisers, Jeremy Kapstein and Bill Lajoie, about taking the GM job on an interim basis. Kapstein said he wanted the job; Lajoie, who is 71 and in recent years has undergone treatment for leukemia, seemed less interested, though he served as de facto GM during the recently concluded baseball winter meetings in Dallas.

In response to an e-mail last night, Lucchino said, ”No comment on our consideration of internal candidates. That has been and remains our policy.” Werner also said in an e-mail that he had no comment. The other principals did not respond last night to e-mails seeking comment. Henry, when reached by colleague Dan Shaughnessy yesterday via e-mail, said Epstein was ”not a candidate at this time.”

All of the Pittsburgh papers are reporting the Pirates have increased their offer to Bill Mueller from two years to three.