Front Office to be Maintained

We all have what they call "pet peeves" in this life, one of my biggest ones is when somebody can't admit when they aren't good at something, or they don't know a lot about a certain subject. If you have been reading this blog in recent months, you know that I will be the first one to admit that I have not been paying all that much attention to the Pittsburgh Pirates and I definitely do not have the strongest opinions on everything going on, but for now I'll weigh in anyways.

As you probably know, today Bob Nutting spoke with the media and told everybody that the front office will be maintained. There's been posts written about this all over Pirates blogs, so check those out for some more analysis, because what I'm going to give you now certainly won't be enough.

Basically, I'm down with keeping the guys around. You can certainly argue it either way, but from what I can tell, Neil Huntington and company have done a pretty good job since they've taken over. When he took the job, there was very little hope for the future; you can't say that anymore. The major league team is much, much better, and we have some real superstar caliber players in the minors. I wouldn't rank the Pirates very high up on the list of top farm systems in the game, but it has improved greatly, and there is still a bunch of young talent that will be on the 2013 Opening Day roster. Maybe you expected us to have been in this stage earlier, and you thought that by the time 2012 rolled around the Pirates would be a playoff team. They were nearly that last year, but a horrible collapse really turned things for the worse. The five year plan didn't exactly work, but I honestly think with another year or two this team is going to be a serious contender.

I like what Huntington has done. He's made his mistakes and has wasted some draft picks, but you won't find too many teams that haven't had their share of that as well. It's really hard to pick players that can make it to the big leagues and be consistently productive. Not that that's an excuse for a GM to be bad at his job, but you can't blame Huntington for all the bad things that have happened recently.

Kyle Stark keeping his job is something that I really don't have an opinion on. I know very little about that job description or what he actually does (I'm being brutally honest here). The whole NAVY SEALs thing is going away, which is kind of funny to me. Stark has been implementing this thing and nobody even really knew about it until the collapse happened. To me it wasn't a big deal at all. It lasted a few days and didn't seem like anything that had anything but a positive impact, but again I could be wrong. I can say this though, if the collapse didn't happen it would still be going on.

The question I want to raise here is who would replace these guys? It's not like there's capable MLB GM's and scout directors just lined up waiting for jobs. Huntington and Stark have jobs for a reason, and if they were obviously worse than somebody that's unemployed, why would they be here in the first place? I'm not saying that there aren't better options out there, because I'm sure there is, somewhere. I just don't know how easy it would be to replace them, and if it's really a good idea to do it at this stage. The team has been improving in recent years so why mess with it now? We have a team that looks pretty solid on paper for 2013, let Huntington and company have a chance to finish what they started.

If you think I'm completely wrong and you disagree with Nutting's decision to keep everyone around, I won't even argue with you. Keep the peace Pittsburgh.