Under 500 words

I have a problem during the off-season. I have a vanishing amount of time to blog in, and whenever I don’t write anything for a couple of days, I tend to try to make up for it by writing something gargantuan, which then exceeds the scope of what I can contain within the small amount of time I have to write, which then exceeds my ability to blog for the day. My drafts page on WordPress is a graveyard of half-formed thoughts and abandoned opening paragraphs. This isn’t necessarily a problem during the season, because each game provides a tight and nice narrative structure for me to work within, but the last couple of years, I’ve tended to get lost in the winter.

At some point during the fall, I started looking back through my old, old archives for something (it involved Andrew McCutchen, I think). Besides being horrified by my writing and my immaturity, I noticed something else: a lot of the posts were very short.

Anyway, in thinking how to get this site back up and on its feet again in 2015, this is what I’ve settled on: I’m going to write one post a day during the week about an important member of the 2015 Pirates, and every day that post is going to be 500 words or fewer. Every post doesn’t need to be a treatise, every paragraph doesn’t need two parenthetical tangents, every thought doesn’t need extensive statistical backing that includes a primer for why that statistical backing is valid and rational. One primer post for each important player, consisting of what I think is most important for that player in the upcoming season. The long-winded, rambling, oddly punctuated manifestos won’t go away, this is just my attempt at kick-starting myself into doing something different.

I understand that 500 words is still a lot of words, but geez, I’m breaking into a cold, nervous sweat watching this post tick up over 300 words and wondering if I can bring it home in another 150-odd words. And this is only the introduction post, which I’m sure a more short-winded and reasonable human being could handle in about 100 words. The goal isn’t to create a hurdle, though, just a motivation and a restraint. I’m publishing this for two reasons: one, making it public creates accountability and two, this post can function as an index for the whole project. I’ll start in positional order (meaning, with starting pitchers, namely Gerrit Cole) tonight and go from there.