Bucs name Livesey senior advisor to Huntington

Veteran baseball executive Bill Livesey was hired Thursday by the Pirates to be a senior advisor to general manager Neal Huntington.

Livesey, 72, has spent the past decade in the front offices of the New York Yankees and Mets, and has a reputation around Major League Baseball as an excellent and intuitive talent evaluator.

As such, his hiring clearly is an attempt to provide some balance to the more contemporary approaches of Huntington and his staffers, who lean heavily on statistical analysis.

Livesey was a Yankees scout from 2008-11. Prior to that, he was a special assistant to Mets GM Jim Duquette.

Upon being brought aboard by Duquette in the spring of 2004, Livesey saw his mandate as, "not just building a championship team, because that can go away. We want to build a championship organization. That's the job here."

His new job is to help the Bucs the same way. Livesey has also made career stops with Tampa Bay and Toronto and has filled roles ranging from player development to managing (in the early 1980s on the lower levels of the Yankees' system).

Livesey's personal link to the Pirates is son Jeff, the organization's Minor League hitting coordinator in 2011-12.