Thursday, October 31, 2013

Another Key Monday Deadline To Consider

(Courtesy of the AP)

Next Monday is the deadline for teams to make qualifying offers to their free agents, and the Yankees are expected to be active in that department over the next 5 days.  It's also the deadline for players or teams with 2014 contract options to make a yay or nay decision on those options.  For the Yankees, that means Derek Jeter and his $9.5 million player option for 2014.

Somebody Fire Up The Burner...

(Hope you've got that phone fully charged, guy. Courtesy of Corey Sipkin/NY Daily News)

... Because it's hot stove time!

In addition to setting off another painful to watch Fraud Sawx celebration last night, Koji Uehara's strike 3 pitch to Matt Carpenter also signaled the official start of the 2013 MLB offseason.  I've been beating around the offseason bush in the last week or so, not wanting to fully dive into it until the season was actually over, and now that time has come so full speed ahead.

Things don't start getting really real until The Winter Meetings in December, but there's a lot of important stuff coming up just in the next week.  Starting today, teams have 5 days to extend qualifying offers to any of their pending free agents they deem worthy.  By next Monday the Yankees have to make QO decisions on Cano, Hirok, C-Grand, and Hughes (my personal decisions here), decisions that will get the wheels turning on a lot of their other offseason plans.

They'll also have to reset their 40-man roster.  There's more than a few guys on the 60-day DL right now, Derek Jeter and Mark Teixeira chief among them, who need to be added.  For once the Yankees shouldn't have a problem clearing spots as there are at least a dozen guys coming off the active roster per free agency.

Like I said, the meat and potatoes of the hot stove season are still to come, but there's plenty that will happen in the next calendar week that will start to shape the path of this offseason.  The Yankees have a helluva lot to do, and with a tick over 5 months until the start of the 2014 season it's time to start doing it.