Since the day he was hired as Pirates general manager, Ben Cherington has spoken about the “four pillars” that will help the Bucs build their next contending team: the identification, acquisition, development and deployment of talent.

Monday's 4 p.m. ET Trade Deadline, a chance to acquire talent to improve Pittsburgh’s farm system, came and went without the Pirates making a move. But Cherington offered a reminder that it was just one such chance to do so, and they preferred to stand pat rather than make moves they might later regret.

“For maybe a variety of reasons, we just didn’t find opportunities this year that we felt really moved the Pirates forward,” Cherington said. “There will be lots more opportunities to do that, and we’d much rather hold than make trades that we’re not confident in that later come back and bite us.”

The Pirates made a trade this past Friday, sending veteran outfielder Jarrod Dyson to the White Sox and receiving $243,300 in additional international spending capacity for the 2019-20 signing period. Other than that, Cherington said the Pirates “just didn’t get offers that we felt were compelling.”

So the Pirates will finish the season with closer Keone Kela, an impending free agent whose recent bout of forearm inflammation likely kept him from being traded. Kela has played catch twice, manager Derek Shelton said. They will keep veteran left-hander Derek Holland, another free agent-to-be. They’ll potentially lose those players without getting anything in return.

But the Bucs will hang on to a handful of players who drew varying levels of interest at the Trade Deadline and come with further years of club control: Chad Kuhl, Trevor Williams, Richard Rodríguez, Chris Stratton and Adam Frazier, among others. All of those players, along with the large group of hitters off to a slow start this season, could still be dealt in the offseason or next year.

"If we have guys that we feel confident are going to be here past this year and for some period of time, that's going to play into it, for sure. Especially if we have confidence that guys are going to continue to perform, or perform even better in the future, that's an important factor,” Cherington said. “We also know that we want to look for opportunities that we feel confident make us stronger, and not do something just for the sake of doing something. We didn't pass that threshold, other than on the Dyson case, this time around."

Cherington said the Pirates received calls on their position players and pitchers, with “maybe a little more activity on the pitchers’ side.” They were said to be on the lookout for a young catcher, which makes sense given the lack of catching depth in their system, but they were primarily in pursuit of young talent. Cherington confirmed that they were “for the most part” looking for returns that would provide long-term help.

“I think we had a lot of conversation, and I thought we might be getting close on a couple things at a couple points in time,” Cherington said. “One of the things we did earlier in the week was to really kind of look at what the line would be that we would need to clear for guys that we felt like we might get calls on, and so we spent a good amount of time setting what that threshold would be.

“We just didn't clear that threshold this year. Sometimes you do, and sometimes you don't. And we definitely learned a lot, and we'll take that information and we'll carry it into the offseason and it'll help us somewhere in the offseason, but it just didn't clear the threshold in most of those cases on this particular one."

It’s worth noting that teams were generally reluctant to part with top prospects, and the Pirates probably weren’t offering anyone who would command a haul anyway. As MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand pointed out, no players on MLB Pipeline’s Top 100 Prospects list were traded on Monday and only one – No. 60 overall prospect Taylor Trammell – was dealt in the run-up to the Deadline.

“You have to make sure that we’re making the right decisions, not only for this year, but moving forward,” said Shelton, who was in touch with the front office throughout Monday. “I felt if we would have been compelled to do something, we would have made a move.

So where do the Pirates go from here? They have the same roster that lost 21 of 31 games to begin the year, and they didn’t move any of those players to improve their farm system.

First, Cherington suggested that the Pirates believe there’s still talent on the international market, so they will use the spending space they acquired for Dyson to add young talent to their organization. Beyond that, Cherington reiterated another point he’s made since he was hired: The goal is to “build” -- not rebuild -- Pittsburgh into a better team, but he’s not putting a timeline on that process.

“It’s actually the word I believe is accurate, because that’s what we’re working to do. We’re working to build a winning team. We believe some of the pieces of that are here,” Cherington said. “Acquisition can happen at lots of different times of the year, and I think the key is to really focus and pursue on the ones where there’s a clear return that’s helping the Pirates. If that doesn’t exist, then we’ve got to be disciplined enough to be patient and wait until it does.

“We know that acquisition will be important. That’ll happen in different kinds of ways over time. This won’t be the last chance.”