If you add one hitter to your lineup comes with real impact.

You're still adding one ninth of your lineup. Good Tuesday morning. I'm Dan Kovachievich of D.K.

Pittsburgh Sports. This is Daily Shot of Pirates, presented to you by the North Shore Tavern.

Comes your way bright and early every weekday. If you're into football and or hockey, I also offer daily shots of Steelers and Penguins in the same place that you found this.

We're five days out now from the beginning of Major League Baseball's winter meetings.

Those are taking place this year in Orlando, Florida.

D.K. Pittsburgh Sports will, of course, be there covering it.

Beat writer Jose Negron.

And while that has been, how do I put this, encouraged over the years by Major League Baseball itself to be an arena of activity, there's nothing anyone can do to enforce that.

And if you end up with some, you know, big deal, regardless of who you are, the day before

the winter meetings or a couple days after everybody's left town, that's just how it goes.

Ben Charington, of course, has faced no such problems. The various winter meetings that he's attended, he shows up, says the same

thing to reporters four days in a row, does the Rule 5 draft leaves. If anything were to happen this year, given the amount of payroll space, the pirates have carved out for themselves.

I'm not talking about the increase here.

I'm talking about just how much has been subtracted, which everybody seems to have forgotten.

Have you noticed that? Like a little bit

of an interlude here. Everyone's like, we'll see if they actually spend this money. Of course

they're going to spend it. They cut drastically over last season and then going on into this offseason.

They're not about to spend less than the 87 million they just spent,

and they're only at 62 at the current projection.

So that's 25 million they're going to spend.

Okay, and interlude.

...