Here's an interesting -- and, frankly, quite encouraging -- tidbit from Dejan about the Pirates' other Rule 5 picks:
The Pirates, as mentioned above, claimed three players in the minor league phase of the Rule 5, all out of Latin American summer leagues. Well, shortly after that happened, people from two of those three teams approached a Pirates official to ask how that happened. Nobody looks for Rule 5 guys down there -- for reasons I am not sure I understand -- and most teams, apparently, do not go so far as to determine which of them is eligible.
This seemed to be quite the point of pride for your club, so I checked back with Huntington to see if he could elaborate. And he did by giving all the credit to director of player development Kyle Stark for making almost monthly trips to the Dominican, to director of baseball operations Bryan Minniti for developing a database of every Rule 5 player on the planet, and to statistical guru and former Baseball Prospectus writer Dan Fox for crunching the numbers to demonstrate if the players were valuable enough to invest those picks.
Stark gets plenty of mention in Pirates coverage, but it always is a little fun to mention behind-the-scenes people like Minniti and Fox, a couple other young guys who are involved in just about every major or minor move management makes.http://community.post-gazette.com/blogs/pbc/default.aspx
