GM Meetings underway in Orlando

Major league Baseball’s General Managers have descended on Orlando Florida for a 3-day long series of meetings. The meetings started this afternoon and Jeff Luhnow has already been busy feeling out both the Free Agent and trade markets.

Another individual that has been busy is Evan Drellich. On his first day as the new Astros beat writer for The Houston Chronicle, Drellich has hit the ground running. Fresh off of his coverage of the World Series Champion Red Sox for masslive.com, Drellich has already made his way to Orlando and posted a number of informative articles at ultimate astros.

Drellich spoke with Jeff Luhnow this afternoon about the this winter’s strategies and provided the following quotes from the Astros’ G.M.

"We’re not going to disrupt our strategy. Our strategy’s pretty clear, and it does involve building our own assets from within.We’ve been accumulating talent and the idea is to use that talent to help us win at the major league level. Whether that comes through trades or players naturally getting there and playing for us, we have to consider all of our alternatives. We know we need to improve at the big league level, and it needs to start next year and it needs to be significant.Really our opportunity is to add another offensive weapon is in the outfield."

Good stuff today from “the new guy”. There’s been a bit of a void since Brian T. Smith switched from covering the Astros to covering the Texans.

In other news coming out of Orlando today, every Free Agent that was given a $14.1 million qualifying offer has turned it down. As we predicted earlier, Drellich confirms that the Astros are not likely to pursue any of those players. However, Luhnow did not completely rule out the possibility.