Thursday, November 1, 2012

Yankees free agents

The Yankees have a total of 14 players hitting free agency, with the key free agents being Russel Martin,  Nick Swisher, Hiroki Kuroda and depending on the status of Mariano Rivera, Rafael Soriano. The last three of these guys will receive a qualifying offer, but the only one with any chance of accepting the $13.3 million dollar qualifying offer would be Hiroki Kuroda, as Soriano and and Swisher will receive large muti year deals. The Yankees seem likely to move away from Swisher, despite him being the best Right Field option for the Yankees and as I said before the Yankees will only look to retain Soriano if Mariano Rivera retires and even then he may be looking for a deal bigger than the Yankees are willing to provide, considering they have several internal closer options.
Russel Martin is an extremly critical retention for the Yankees and he will likely get a multi year deal from them, because he and and AJ Pierzynski are the only everyday catchers on the market. The Yankees have also expressed intrest in brining back Ichiro Suzuki and Raul Ibanez on short term deals, but I don't know how much playing time Ibanez would get due to the rotating DH for the veteran Yankees. Some people really want Ichiro to return, but he should be the Yankees B or C options due to his age.
Andy Pettitte joins Mariano Rivera as someone who is going to either sign with the Yankees or retire and it remains to be seen what either will do at this point.
There is also a chance that the Yankees will retain Eric Chavez and Jayson Nix, but after that none of the Yankees free agents are likely to be retained on anything more than minor league deals and i personally doubt that Nix or Chavez will return. If the Yankees do not retain any of their free agents then there will be a number of holes to fill, that will require a venture into free agency as they will not be able to fill them internally.

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