Neal Huntington on free agency

From Pirates.com:

"The reality is we're just trying to acquire talent and deepen the talent level in the organization. That's our main goal," Huntington said in a discussion about the club's potential interest in free agents. "As we are looking at the 2009 Pirates, we'd love to upgrade the offense, upgrade our pitching and rebuild the bench. But ultimately, our focus is on acquiring talent."

[...]

"We're not going to play on the first tier [of players] and the first tier is going to establish the market," Huntington said. "We are in touch with a number of players that we are interested in, but much of their decisions will come after that market is set. We're not going to set the market at any rate."

I'm not sure, but I think "we'd love to upgrade the offense, upgrade our pitching, and rebuild the bench" may be my favorite quote from any GM in recent Pirate history. I feel like someone should make that into a t-shirt. Huntington's either being intentionally vague or hilariously blunt.

Anyways, there's not a whole lot to read into here. The team could certainly use more pitching depth to prevent a repeat of last year's disaster and provide injury insurance . And depending on how active Huntington's planning on being in the trade market, Huntington's likely interested in middle infielders and more castoffs to fill the Michaels/Mientkiewicz/Rivas roles on the 2009 team. This isn't exactly ground-breaking stuff here, but it should be interesting to see what exactly Huntington does this winter.