LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — At PiratesFest Saturday, general manager Neal Huntington and president Frank Coonelly told fans what had seemed all but certain for months: Third baseman Jung Ho Kang, tied up in diplomatic no-man’s land since last year, likely is not returning to Pittsburgh.
Because the front office uttered this news in stronger-than-usual terms, it sounded fresh. The reality, however, is the Pirates reached that conclusion not this offseason, but in the middle of the summer, when the team traded for Sean Rodriguez.
“We’ll continue to go through the process — and hope that a year later and hope that a year of positive behavior from Jung Ho will allow a different decision to be made — but we actually had begun that process with the Rodriguez acquisition,” Huntington said Tuesday at Major League Baseball’s winter meetings at Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort.
For Pirates fans, the Kang situation still has some unanswered questions: What were the team’s plans for redistributing the salaries of Kang and Starling Marte, who was suspended for half of the 2017 season? What did the Pirates, whose trademark is finding talent in largely uncharted baseball territories, learn from this?
On the first question — whether Kang and Marte’s salaries will or had already been redistributed — Huntington was vague. Kang was supposed to make $2.75 million this past season and $3 million in 2018; Marte’s 80-game drug suspension cost him half of his $5 million salary in 2017.
“It’s all been accounted for,” Huntington said Monday. “And I mean it’s hard to [say], ‘Where did this dollar go?’ It’s all a part of the process. It’s a part of the budgeting process last year, a part of the budgeting process this year. And there’s really no way to account for any single dollar or even single players’ dollars. So, the best answer I can give you is yes, it’s a part of last year’s process, it’s a part of this year’s process, and we’ll continue to push forward.”
Unless the Pirates make a trade or free-agent acquisition, the hot corner will be held down by a group of players, including Rodriguez, Adam Frazier, David Freese, Josh Harrison, Max Moroff and Jose Osuna.
On the second question, Huntington acknowledged that the Pirates whiffed on Kang’s DUI history, although he generally praised the team’s due diligence in player acquisitions.
“In the bigger picture, we are proud of the efforts that we take in all player acquisitions,” he said. “We’re not going to be perfect. … We were embarrassed that we didn’t know about the first two [DUIs], but there was no indication from anybody anywhere that we had spoken with, that we were involved with, that we’d asked questions of, that there were any signs of problems. We didn’t get it, and that’s on us. We understand that.”
Saturday at PNC Park, Coonelly took much of the blame for the Kang saga.
“I thought we could get him in the country,” Coonelly said at PiratesFest. “The visa process was more complicated for him than we realized, sitting here today, and that was on me. I gave Neal bad advice saying, ‘I think we can get Jung Ho into the country.’”
Tuesday, though, Huntington wouldn’t let Coonelly fall on the sword alone.
“I appreciate Frank’s willingness to do that,” he said. “I was right there with him.”
Elizabeth Bloom: ebloom@post-gazette.com and Twitter @BloomPG.
First Published: December 13, 2017, 1:48 a.m.
Updated: December 13, 2017, 3:25 a.m.
