The final building block

The final building block piece is in the PG today and it's about Neal Huntington, of course.
There's a long list of Huntington's new evaluation system and as per the usual, everything he says sounds good. I won't rehash it all here, but I'm sure most of you have read the article by now (and if you haven't, you should). The one thing that does bother me is the constant talk of placing an internal valuation on players and not budging from it. Everything that happens in baseball, be it a trade or a free agent signing, is a negotiation and being rigid on asking price is something that doesn't always play well. Eventually, a team like the Pirates needs to overpay for someone to prove to the rest of the league that Pittsburgh isn't a baseball graveyard. Huntington's right in that there was no one really worth signing out there and I'm certainly not losing sleep over guys like Luis Vizcaino, Johnny Estrada, and Paul Bako playing elsewhere. If Huntington does his job well, though, there's eventually going to be a free agent that can help the Pirates and I just hope he doesn't let his "internal valuation" get in the way at that point if he has to pay a 15% tax to get a player to come to Pittsburgh. Actually, I just hope he gets to that point in the first place. We're still a long ways off.