5 BOROUGH SPORTS

Well there goes Johnny Damon! Tonight free-agent outfielder Randy Winn signed with the Yankees for 1 year / $2 million. This season, Winn will compete with Brett Gardner for the starting position in left field. Last season, Winn hit .262 with 2 home runs and 51 RBI with the San Francisco Giants and was an all-star in 2002 as an outfielder for Tampa Bay. This move clearly means that the Yanks have no intentions of re-signing Damon. After rejecting a 2 year / $14 million offer in November, it seemed that Damon’s tenure was over in New York.  In the past couple of weeks, however, the Yankees and Damon were negotiating a new contract. Now it certainly seems that those negotiations are over.

As for Winn, I would say this is a decent move. The Yankees can’t trust Gardy to be an everyday outfielder and Winn provides solid defense and some offense to this extremely dangerous lineup. Last season, he had an on-base percentage of .318 while in San Francisco. Having Winn and Nick Johnson anchor the bottom of the order will be a significant improvement from last year.  Would I rather have Damon? Of course. But he’s not worth of $7 million a year.  Winn is better defensively and hopefully Granderson will take over offensively for Damon. Overall, the Yanks just got a solid outfielder for 2 mill and I have no problem with that.

This entry was posted on January 27, 2010 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Yankees. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.