Joel Sherman is reporting that the Yankees will indeed trade away
Ivan Nova before the Trade Deadline.
They will not extend the qualifying offer to Nova, which makes total sense. Ivan is not worth the estimated $16.5 million that the QO would give a player, which means that the Yankees would lose him and get nothing in return.
And when you look at the fact that the team will have
Masahiro Tanaka,
CC Sabathia,
Nathan Eovaldi,
Michael Pineda, and
Luis Severino in 2017, there's no reason to spend that much on a middle to bottom of the rotation starter.
To put that another way, the Yanks already have Eovaldi, Pineda, and Sabathia to fill the 3-4-5 spots in the rotation, and Nova is certainly not a 1 or 2. And when an injury pops up next season, the Yankees will have either Chad Green or Luis Cessa to fill in.
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Yesterday I was thinking that a player about to hit free agency would probably love to be traded. That way they can not be given a qualifying offer, which could very well hurt their chances of a contract since the team that signed him would lose a draft pick. That's especially true for a guy like Ivan Nova, who is not good enough for a team to disregard losing that draft pick.
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The Yankees are about to run into a problem. Mind you, it's a nice problem to have, but a problem none-the-less.
The manager of the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Railriders says that
Aaron Judge is about four or five days from being activated from the disabled list. That means there would be quite the logjam in the outfield, with Judge,
Ben Gamel, J
ake Cave,
Mason Williams, and C
esar Puello. And that's not including
Tyler Austin, who the Yankees would probably like to keep putting out there to get familiar with the position.
Furthermore, that's not counting on the fact that newly acquired
Billy McKinney and
Dustin Fowler are right there in AA, about ready to make the jump to AAA.
Like when it comes to losing Nova, the Yankees should find a trade involving one or more of these prospects to clear things up. Perhaps they could package one of them with Ivan Nova to get a stronger return.