The trouble with rebuilding

In my desperation for Pirate news, I have turned to reading Pirates.com articles. I'm running over some other stuff in my head, but it's not ready for a post yet. Anyways, I stumbled upon this passage at the dot-com and it caught my eye:

Can a club that finished last season with a disappointing 68-94 mark expect many of the same pieces to come back a year later and make significant strides to ensure that the club doesn't finish with a 16th consecutive losing season?

Will a team that underachieved for much of 2007 mesh under the tutelage of a new manager and coaching staff enough to make a climb up the division standings?

Is this club one that can be actively competitive in 2008, or will it be another two, three, four years before things come together?

Ask general manager Neal Huntington, and he won't hesitate to admit that the challenges between balancing the now with the future have been trying. But, he advises, don't mistake that for suggesting that the Pirates don't have the pieces necessary to compete this season.

The emphasis is, of course, mine. Now most of that article is pure fluff (the answers are, in order, no, no, no, and probably more than that) as you'll usually find on MLB.com and its team sites in the winter. It's pointless to complain about stuff like that because it's the nature of the beast. That last paragraph is what bothers me. I have no idea what Huntington actually told Langosch for the purpose of that article, but I'll assume that we're going off of some kind of statement here.

Anyways, the heart of my problem with this story lies in the bold statement. We've already discussed the A's rebuilding today. Billy Beane is not attempting to strike a balance between the future and the now. He has determined that his Oakland A's cannont win in 2008 and he's now building for a day in the future. The A's won't win a lot of games this year, but they probably will down the road. Either that, or Beane will be fired. There's no middle ground in rebuilding. Either you're rebuilding or you're not. I still think it's too early to judge Huntington as a GM, but if he truly thinks there's a way he can rebuild for the future and have the team be competitive now, it's time to start dreaming about what the next GM can do for us.