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First Pitch: Back and Different Than Before

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Let’s call this a rehab assignment.

I’ve had migraines for as long as I can remember. I used to get them as a kid, kept getting them until now, and they’ve only gotten worse the last several years. I’m talking at least five headaches a week, some that last multiple days, and usually at least one day a week where the pain is so much that I throw up.

Every few years I go through a series of tests and scans to see if I can find a reason for the migraines. Every time I get the same thing: You’re totally healthy, so here’s some new stuff to take to help when you inevitably get a migraine.

Lately my approach has been similar to one of the old Pirates reclamation projects. Let’s go back to a time when things were better, figure out what I was doing in every aspect of life during that time, and try to recreate that in order to improve the migraines. The downside is that this is still two migraines a week, but the upside is that it’s only two migraines a week.

Part of this “rehab assignment” is to have a regular routine. I used to have that built around this site. I’d wake up and get to writing. I’d have daily features, plus additional articles throughout the week.

I don’t want this to come across as a sob story. The migraines suck, but it’s a shitty routine part of my life. The big takeaway here is that I want to write again, and more often than I have been. Every time I’ve said that in the past, I get hit with a wave of migraines that sets me back. So I’m building up slow.

This article will be a daily feature for the offseason. Yeah, it’s not technically the offseason yet for the Pirates, but it pretty much is. It’s going to be more relaxed, and mostly off-topic. The goal will be to provide a discussion thread to start the day, with a sectioned article (similar to the Morning Report) that gives you something easy to wake up and read.

The goal for me is getting back in the habit of writing daily, while managing my other site duties, and trying to curtail the migraines. That last part means you’re not going to find any migraine inducing topics here, so no politics, world events, Spider-Man’s movie rights going back to Sony, or anything else that naturally gives you a headache.

Tomorrow will be the first version of this article with sectioned formats. For today, I have two things to note before wrapping this up.

First is the name of this column, which was pretty simple. My old daily feature was First Pitch. That was more of a daily column on the Pirates. This won’t be an article specifically on the Pirates, and there won’t be much analysis here. I’ll still have that in other articles. But First Pitch seems fitting, as it’s the first thing that will go up on the site each day, and it’s always been my daily feature on this site, regardless of the format.

The second thing today is a game. I play games every morning when I wake up to get my mind going. Today’s game is a Sporcle quiz, and one of my favorite memory exercises relating to the Pirates. Name every Pirates Opening Day lineup since 1991.

My score was 235 out of 263. I knew most of the Pirates lineups from 1991-1994 (when I lived in Pennsylvania), then saw a ton of misses from 1995-2001, only to get all but four players from 2002-2019. One of those misses today was rather embarrassing. I won’t say who it was, but if you get the left fielder in 2011 / the right fielder in 2012, you’ll know who it is. And yet somehow I got the third baseman from 2004.

Let me know how you did in the comments.


Tim Williams
Tim Williams
Tim is the owner, producer, editor, and lead writer of PiratesProspects.com. He has been running Pirates Prospects since 2009, becoming the first new media reporter and outlet covering the Pirates at the MLB level in 2011 and 2012. His work can also be found in Baseball America, where he has been a contributor since 2014 and the Pirates' correspondent since 2019.

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