Real quick, and don't put too much thought into this.

What's been your most surprising storyline of the spring so far?

Uh-huh.

Thoughts up.

Good morning to you.

Good. Thursday morning. I'm Dan Kovachvich of D.K. Pittsburgh Sports. This is Daily Shot of Pirates. It 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 you found this. Pirates 7, Blue Js 6 yesterday in Great Fruit Ball.

That was in Bradenton, and a lot of the usual cast ended up highlighting the box score.

O'Neill Cruz and Joey Bart homered, Mitch Keller had a nice little start. 62 pitches, by the way,

which is just my way of saying, we're getting close, you know. Ryan Burucky, a nice outing

in relief. And that's, that's fine. Okay. I'm not, as you know, attaching any sort of importance

to outcomes, collective,

or really even individual.

But one thing I've consistently maintained throughout this off-season

that's been so uninspiring and so static,

and as a result, so, you know,

gloom and doom in terms of its feel, is that something significant needed to happen.

Somebody needed to really rise up.

There needed to be that one player, even if it's just a March mirage, even if it's just somebody who goes into Miami and has a nice four-game series and then the coach turns back into a pumpkin and that's the end of them.

Something.

Maybe multiple somethings from the offensive perspective need to happen.

That doesn't mean Matt Gorski hitting a couple homers early on. So if I'm looking from a perspective where I'm searching out

positives, the first and most important point that I can share is that it takes some digging.

...