Pirates GM Neal Huntington Post Trade Deadline Comments

The Pittsburgh Pirates didn’t get better at the Major League Baseball Non-waiver Trade Deadline today.  The Pirates GM Neal Huntington made his comments to the press on the inaction to improve the ballclub.

We tried to capture the quotes as precisely as possible.

"We felt like we were close a couple of times.  At the end of the day, we weren’t able to push it across the line.“We had a lot of scouts out there…these guys were getting after it for six weeks now.  It’s more challenging than their traditional coverage.  We wanted to add to the club.  We worked hard to add to the club, but in the final decision process, the best move we felt was to stay where we are at this point.”We will continue to look as we did a year ago.We are looking forward to a strong finish.The core of this team is the team that put us in position to have best night of baseball in long time.  We are going to get some guys healthy.  We have some guys that we think are on the verge of being able to help us.  We have a coaching staff that will help these guys grow.  We have players that will go out and compete.I think it will be a challenge, as we did a year ago.  We worked through situations that didn’t come thru and a couple that did.  (Waivers trade line)  We will see how things will be played out.We get Gerrit Cole back…that will add an arm we have to make a decision on.  Guys in AAA that could be options.  A couple guys that are close to turning corner…a few guys that we need to push in order to turn a corner.The majority of the imnpact…sort of like an NBA environment…established guys for less established guys.  We were engaged on a ton of fronts, but couldn’t get right deal for us.We felt we were agressive.  But at end of day we felt right move was no move."