At the end of the day, in any draft, in any sport, the general manager has the ultimate say, and thus the general manager gets the ultimate credit or blame.

But when it came to Connor Griffin, when it came to Seth Hernandez,

the pirates passed two first round picks.

Both of them touted around the industry.

The credit that I was hearing went to Justin Horowitz. Good morning to

you. Good. Monday morning, I'm Dan Kovachievich 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

that you found this. Horowitz was hired, promoted, really, to be an assistant general manager

with the Nationals after two years as scouting director in Pittsburgh. That's a pretty

impressive rocketing under any circumstance.

He's a young dude.

But he also made quite an impression.

That's how things go.

The baseball industry is insular.

It's all knowing.

Everybody's aware of what the other one's doing.

And there's no way there wasn't going to be a whole lot of questioning being done about who was it that got that hitter in Pittsburgh.

Not to mention who got him at number nine overall. Now granted, eight other teams have to make a mistake for the young man to be available at 9, but somebody still has to

be able to see through the smoke that gets created in such a setting. In other words, you start

having your doubts. Hey, hang on a second. Why is nobody taking him when we can all see that he can

hit? What's the fatal flaw here? What are we missing? You have to have some real

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