Back on October 25th, I mentioned in my Top 50 Free Agents list that "if Damon and Lofton aren’t available, Preston Wilson may frighteningly be the best option in CF" for the Yankees. At this point, it’s starting to look like the Yankees won’t try to acquire even a Wilson type for their vacancy.
According to a source of mine just returning from the winter meetings, the Yankees don’t like the CF market and didn’t have the ammo to acquire Juan Pierre or even Joey Gathright. The club plans on shoving Bubba Crosby out there to start the season and making a deal mid-season. I origninally thought all of this Bubba stuff was just posturing, but it seems the Yankees will really give him a shot for a few months.
Once we reach July, the Cardinals and Twins will have a better gauge on whether they want to deal Jim Edmonds and Torii Hunter. Edmonds has an affordable $10MM club option for 2007, so the Yanks would really have to put together an impressive package to pry him away. But the Cardinals are looking more like an 85-90 win team these days, and with a little bad luck they could be dealing off a few veterans by summertime. The Twins can exercise a $12MM option on Hunter for 2007, and that’s probably not going to happen. Look for the Hunter talks to heat up a few months into the ’06 season.
