One Week to Go
The free agent period gates open up next week, hundreds of ballplayers and their agents on one side, thirty GM's waving contracts on the other. Let's hope one of them isn't Aramis Ramirez. Here's a rundown of the names bandied about in some rumors and trades that I've read in the mass media.
2B - Mark Derosa
CF - Alfonso Soriano, Gary Matthews Jr., Vernon Wells
3B - Nomar Garciaparra
LF - Carlos Lee, Gary Sheffield
P - Daisuke Matsuzaka, Jason Schmidt, Ted Lilly, Miguel Batista, Hiroki Kuroda, Kei Igawa, Aaron Heilman
And of course all the incumbents like Ramirez, Wood and Pierre. Jimbo likes to hold his cards close though and organizational meetings begin Tuesday, so I imagine the beat writers will be kind enough to feed us rumor vultures with a few more bits over the next week.
A few new ones from today...
- More Marcus Giles trade talks although this one has him in a move to the Padres to play with his brother and move to 3b.
- Some of the teams that dropped out of the Matsuzaka race may have done so because Boras told them Matsuzaka wasn't interested in playing for them, specifically the Dodgers (I like the guy already) and Mariners (didn't want to play under Ichiro's shadow).
- Kind of a throw away at boston.com in there that the Cubs are on the block for $1 billion dollars. The Nomar to the Cubs mention is in there as well. The $1 billion does make sense, I believe the Cubs are valued around $600 million or so and I'm guessing Tribco would like even a little more to cover the problems with their other businesses. So start saving those pennies.
And go Bears!!
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