Mitre, Gaudin Likely to Return

From Joel Sherman:

The Yankees have until a week from Thursday to pick up Sergio Mitre’s $1.25 million option for 2010. But even if they do not pick up the option, Mitre is arbitration eligible and the Yankees intend to keep him, sources tell The Post.

What the organization is weighing now is whether Mitre’s arbitration price would fall below $1.25 million.

I am honestly not too surprised; the Yankees clearly showed that they confidence in Mitre last year, letting him continue to pitch despite his struggles.  I bet the Yankees and Mitre agree to a deal where Mitre gets a slight pay decrease, say $1.125 million dollars, avoiding the risk of losing even more money after his terrible year.

If Mitre returns to his pre-Tommy John surgery status, then great.  The Yankees would have a cheap, solid starter for the back of the rotation.  

Also, the Yankees are going to have a lot of starting pitching depth going into spring training:

The Yanks intend to bring back both Mitre and Chad Gaudin, they think (Ian) Kennedy will be at full strength in spring training after ending well and going to the Arizona Fall League, and their initial plan is to ask (Alfedo) Aceves, (Joba) Chamberlain and (Phil) Hughes to come to spring ready to be starters. As for (Chien-Ming) Wang, the Yanks almost certainly will not tender him a contract, which would cost $5 million at the least.

Gaudin's FIPS and other statistics show that he might have gotten lucky during his tenure with the Yankees.  But he is still very young and certainly has potential; and maybe he does continue his success from last year.

I have no idea what the Yankees can get out of Kennedy next year.  He seemed to recover fine from his aneurysm surgery, but can be overcome his ineffectiveness in the Majors?  

Chamberlain and Hughes - I'm not even going to discuss here.  And I'm sure that Aceves is just a back-up plan.

Wang - I'll do a post on him a different time.

But basically the important thing here is that the Yankees want plenty of cheap starting pitching options; I imagine, assuming there isn't a huge starting pitching signing, that they will have a bunch of guys fighting it out for the #5 spot in the rotation.