According to John Perrotto of the Beaver County Times, the Pirates are likely to hire Neal Huntington as their next GM. Huntington is currently a special assistant to Mark Shapiro in Cleveland. Perrotto believes Huntington could be announced Monday.
Cory Humes of Pittsburgh Lumber Co. has been Googling his heart out to dig up more info on Huntington, so I refer you to him.
Huntington appears to love the scouting aspect of the game. There’s a lot of good info and quotes from this 2005 Jerry Crasnick article, though it’s behind the ESPN Insider wall. Paid content is dying…I’m waiting for ESPN to go the way of the New York Times and knock down the wall. No one is going to subscribe to ESPN to read this Huntington article, but if it was freely available they’d get a ton of traffic and make money off ads on it. And while I’m on my soapbox: pay-for-subscription websites shouldn’t show ads to its subscribers.