Daily Distractions: Qualifying offers trickling in, Elian Herrera claimed by Milwaukee Brewers, etc.

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Hiroki Kuroda

Former Dodgers pitcher Hiroki Kuroda received a qualifying offer worth $14.1 million from the New York Yankees today. (Getty Images)

It’s been a busy day for qualifying offers around the majors. Among the names reported today to have received the $14.1 million offers for 2014: Robinson Cano, Hiroki Kuroda, Curtis Granderson, Jacoby Ellsbury, Stephen Drew, Mike Napoli, Carlos Beltran, Ubaldo Jimenez, Brian McCann and Kendrys Morales.

All those players could be off the market by tomorrow if they accept the qualifying offer.

If they don’t, and certainly not all will, the Dodgers and 28 other teams are faced with a choice: Sign the player as a free agent, or sacrifice a 2014 first-round draft pick. For a team like the Dodgers, who have a handful of high-level prospects but not many more tradeable assets in their farm system, that’s a difficult and expensive signing to justify. Cano is arguably the only elite player on that list and the Dodgers aren’t expected to make a run at him.

The others — some of whom made my short list of players to watch — just made themselves a little less attractive to the Dodgers.

A few bullet points for a Panamanian Flag Day:

• Elian Herrera was claimed off waivers by the Milwaukee Brewers today. The Dodgers now have 32 players on their 40-man roster.

• In a sense, Herrera was a human measuring stick for the difference between the 2012 Dodgers and the 2013 Dodgers. A veteran of 521 minor-league games when he was recalled from Triple-A in May 2012, Herrera spent roughly the next three months on the Dodgers’ roster. He was batting .305 after the first month. In 2013, he appeared in four games.

• Friday’s game between the Glendale Desert Dogs (featuring Dodgers prospects Corey Seager and Onelki Garcia, among others) and Scottsdale Scorpions will be televised on MLB Network at 6 p.m. PT. It will be one of five Arizona Fall League games this week to feature MLB’s proposed replay system.

• Remember, the Mariners’ short list is actually quite long:

 

• If you enjoy reveling in the San Francisco Giants’ misery, their 2012 international signing class took a gruesome hit.

• Here’s a good recap of The Week in Dodgers Prospects.

• Happy birthday to Eric Karros (46) and Eddie Basinski (91), who played the violin and had the competitive fire of Michael Jordan, Joe DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig.

• Joe Torre, Steve Garvey and Tommy John are on *a* Hall of Fame ballot.

• It took a few tries, but Paul McCartney finally figured out the limits of his voice on his new album, “New.” Check out one the most palatable tracks he’s released in years, “Appreciate”: