The Pirates have saved roughly $17 million via A.J. Burnett's retirement and Pedro Alvarez's release, and they've theoretically still got the $12 million salary they'd have been delighted to commit to J.A. Happ before the Blue Jays threw a whole lot of loonies his way.
That's not the most in-depth form of accounting, but let's go with that for the sake of simplicity, OK?
Let's go with this, too: The Pirates' payroll will top $100 million in 2016, sources told me in the past week, a figure that will mark a franchise first as well as at least a $10 million increase over this year.
So now we're up to about $40 million in loose change and, after a quarter of that gets committed to raises for the eight remaining arbitration-eligible players, we're at $30 million.
That's no bounty by Major League Baseball standards, but it's plenty enough to do this:
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