Pirates' General Manager Neal Huntington's press conference

Selected quotes from Pirates General Manager Neal Huntington's press conference:

Pirates were focused on upgrading the offense

We probably focused more energy on the offense and adding a bat. As you saw from the market, not many bats moved anywhere. It was a very shallow market to begin with. Not only the offensive market, but the pitching market was arguably one of the shallowest I've seen in 20 plus years in the game.

Teams chose not to sell for "not necessarily baseball reasons"

There were a lot of teams that opted to hold for not necessarily baseball reasons. Which made it a challenging market in and of itself when you got that few sellers but then you got some mid-range teams that hold onto players it reduces the talent pool, no question.

Huntington did not make clear what those non-baseball reasons were.

Waiver market "could" be more active this year

Teams may feel more out it at that point in time. We'll certainly continue to be active. We looked exhaustively, big, medium, small to try to find a way to help this club. ... we'll certainly look exhaustively into the August.

Huntington says he was aggressive

There is no question we forced the issue. I made offers that made me incredibly uncomfortable. But I did so with the idea that we wanted to help this club.

Huntington would not get into specifics about players.

Comfortable with the offense and Tony Sanchez

We're comfortable with the players that we have. We're comfortable with the signs that we're seeing. ... We're comfortable with some of the guys in the system that can step up and help this offense be more productive.

We're very comfortable with Tony Sanchez up here as a Major League caliber catcher. ... We'll continue to look for a small trade. You can trade for guys who are not on a Major League roster.

The second half of the Sanchez quote, Huntington is referring to adding an emergency catcher for depth.

Lambo on the radar

He is a guy we do feel that with some continued growth, some continued adjustments, could help us at the Major League level this summer.

Willing to spend

"We would have taken on significant contracts." Contract costs were not a "deciding factor."

Current roster is the "right" 25

It's the right 25. We think they are the guys that are ready to be up here and contribute at the Major League level. ... We knew there were some areas we could improve upon, but at the same time there are some things we could do internally to improve upon those areas.

Willing to "do something stupid"

We were willing to do something stupid. We just didn't want to do something insane. ... Even the ones that we stretched into the stupid level, we found a cut-off point where it just didn't make sense to go beyond because of our confidence in this group.