For the first time since the trade deadline, Pittsburgh Pirates general manager Neal Huntington spoke to the media. Here are some of the highlights of that conversation.
On the potential of August acquisitions: “We’re certainly looking for ways to add to the club. The challenge becomes the way the system works. An American League player has to go through the entire American League and then anybody with a worse record than us to get to us. Typically, it’s a rare player that does get to us from the American League.”
On trading reliever Arquimedes Caminero to the Mariners: “There were conversations about a number of players as the trade deadline approached, and Caminero was one of them. As we put our players through the trade waiver process, one team can claim him, and Seattle claimed him. We engaged in a more formal conversation just about him. The discussion prior to the deadline was a bigger package. We also knew we had upcoming moves and were looking to shift some of our existing pitchers around. We can acquire some player or players depending on how the situation works out. They got a good arm in Caminero, and we’ll see what he does there.
We are a deadline driven society. Typically, both sides feel the best deals come at the deadline. That’s where the activity picked up.”
On his regret for being unable to sign pitcher J.A. Happ: “The challenge is that Francisco’s first year of his three year contract was a fantastic season. J.A has thrown the ball well and certainly has continued to do what he did for us last year. There’s still two years on that contract for time to tell. We wanted to re-sign J.A, but we weren’t able to meet the financial ask or chose not to, and Toronto was aggressive and got him. Hindsight always wishes you had the opportunity to do something differently. We have to make the best decisions at the time with the information we have. We have to project what we think is going to happen and learn from the outcomes.”
On trying to get out in front of the narrative: “It’s not controlling as much it’s letting people know why we do what we do. We’ve worked to be very transparent and open about why we do what we do and why we make the decisions we make. Sometimes things are controversial and make people unhappy. There’s two sides to the story, and the truth is in between.
We understand that the franchise’s history allows for people to jump on the negative very quickly. It’s unfortunate… They’re going to take and so what they want and believe with it. Maybe we could have influenced no one and maybe we could have influenced a lot of people, that was the challenge. We wanted to be respectful of players who were involved in the trade. We want them to hear from us that they’ve been traded, not through the media, and that’s becoming more challenging as leaks happen.
We wanted to be sure the player heard from us, and that was more important than anything optically beyond that. We wanted to make sure we respected the player — this was the focus for us. As a result, the optics came out very negative, and we’ve taken a beating for it. But we still feel like we made the right move in doing what we needed to do to handle this situation the way we needed to handle it.”
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