Non Tendered Free Agents

The non tender deadline for baseball was Saturday at midnight. If you don't know what that is it is players that were eligible for arbitration but the team decided to not offer them a contract making them free agents. The notable names that came out of this were Jack Cust, Matt Capps, Garrett Atkins, Clay Condrey, John Buck. There are some others too but these are probably the most well known players. I believe John Buck signed with the Toronto Blue Jays over the weekend. It will be interesting to see if the Yankees would be interested in anyone, I would say no or more likely the Mets. The Yankees need a leftfielder but if they don't resign Johnny Damon they will most likely play Melky Cabrera in left and Granderson in center and probably bring Hideki Matsui back as the DH. I think the Yankees are pretty well set with even their bench, they have Francisco Cervelli as the backup catcher, Ramiro Pena or someone else from their minor league system as the utility infielder, Jamie Hoffman and Brett Gardner as the extra outfielders. It is interesting though with the economy the way it is that some bigger names weren't offered contracts and became free agents. I forgot the most notable from the Yankees Chien-Ming Wang who won 19 games in back to back seasons in 06 and 07. I wasn't suprised the Yankees didn't offer him a contract but am a little suprised that he refused a split contract. The Yankees apparently wanted to give him a minor league contract that could switch to major league if he made the team, considering he had major injuries the last 2 seasons I think it was nice of the Yankees to even consider that but Wang is still upset with the Yankees for taking him to arbitration over 600,000 in 2006.