Here’s some wishful thinking: when your team is combing the Census Bureau records of deceased persons to winnow the list of possible lefties to whom you might extend spring-training non-roster invitations, you’d hope that the front office could dredge up one whose last good, injury-free season was more recent than 1996. But Donovan Osborne has drawn an invite despite a 9-15, 4.77 ERA in 209.1 innings over the past seven seasons. Hey, he was lights-out for about a month in Arkansas six years ago, but Elizabeth Taylor was quite a looker back in the day, too.

Big Red Cliff has a quick ID of the other bodies who washed ashore, including Joe Girardi, a member of the Amazing Torrealba Backstop family, and the man with the all-time greatest name in baseball history: Homer Bush. Cliff points out that the Yanks DFA’d Fernando Seguinol, who would have made a better complement to Jason Giambi than Tony Clark, and that a 25-year-old cornerman named Jeff Deardorff might be a sleeper in the Brian Myrow for Third darkhorse race. Some interesting projections from Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA weighted mean spreadsheet for AVG/OBP/SLG:

Clark     .239/.317/.415

Seguignol .255/.324/.461



Deardorff .245/.307/.440

Myrow     .241/.340/.409

Veddy interesting, though obviously that’s just one system’s opinion. When I first posted this stuff absent the PECOTA data, Cliff drew my attention to the fact that he was advocating Clark over Seguignol. But that’s typical Proven Veteranitis thinking which has left the Yankees with a craptacular bench for several years now, and I’d rather see them give the unknown a shot for a change. As for third base, my preference would be for the OBP guy, but Deardorff couldn’t possibly be worse with the leather than Myrow, could he?