East Notes: Yankees, Hughes, Zimmermann, Mets

As the Yankees and Phil Hughes negotiated their one-year, $7.15MM deal for 2013, the topic of an extension hardly came up, writes Andy McCullough of the Star-Ledger.  As a pitcher, Hughes says that he never expected a long-term deal out of the Yankees before reaching free agency.  At the same time, it sounds as though he'd like to stay in the Bronx for the long-term.  “The Yankees are the ones who drafted me; they’re like a second family. For me to say I’d be neutral [about leaving New York] would be dishonest," said Hughes.  Here's more out of the AL and NL East..

• Jordan Zimmermann would be open to listening on a multi-year extension, but so far nothing has happened on that front, writes Adam Kilgore of the Washington Post.  The Nationals and the right-hander avoided arbitration with a one-year, $5.35MM deal yesterday.
• Andy Martino of the New York Daily News (on Twitter) believes that Mets Triple-A manager Wally Backman would be a great big league manager, but he has a feeling that it will happen elsewhere and not with the Mets.  If the Mets don't bring back Terry Collins next year, Martino expects the club to go with a younger skipper. 
• Jair Jurrjens' contract with the Orioles is now a minor league deal rather than a guaranteed pact, but the pitcher says he's not overly concerned about it, writes Roch Kubatko of MASNsports.com.  The two sides first agreed to a $1.5MM contract with incentives potentially pushing the figure to $4MM, but red flags on his physical led to the O's insisting on a reworked deal.