Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 30
“There’s no weekend.” I remember thinking that night after night in the early going, as I held Derek Jr. in my arms while everyone else slept. There’s no weekend. In baseball, they talk about the grind of a long season. Even the off days are rarely actual days off because there’s so much travel involved. Everyone’s banged up. Everyone’s fighting to get proper nutrition and enough sleep. I don’t know if it’s true, but I remember reading somewhere that ballplayers consider a day game followed by a night game essentially a day off, just because they finally get an evening to themselves. Anyway, that’s what I used to think in the dark in the wee hours of the morning, feeling new aches in my arms or my neck or my back or all three. There is no weekend. There is no day off. Saturday has come and gone, and I’m up in the middle of the night with Derek Jr. Sunday will come, and I’ll again be up in the middle of the night with Derek Jr. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 26
We’re trying to decide whether Derek Jr. is ready to move up from size two diapers to size three. I mention that we’ve still got a couple size one diapers left in the diaper bag. Maybe it’s not too late to use them up so they don’t go to waste. “Those size one diapers,” replies my wife, whose gorgeous, haunting debut novel comes out next fall, “would not fit one of her butt cheeks.”
May 27
Similarities Between My Daughter and Professional Baseball Players:
They’re disturbingly young.
They love spending time at the park.
They’re incapable of keeping their saliva in their mouths where it belongs.
They have shockingly thick forearms.
They frequently dirty their uniforms.
They’re constantly besieged by photographers.
They have a carefully monitored nutrition regimen.
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 25
After nearly five hours of sleep, Derek Jr. wakes up a bit past one in the morning. She’s clearly struggling with some gas issues. I try to soothe her without taking her out of the crib, bicycling her little legs to help her through it, but it doesn’t help at all. She displays every sign of ravenous hunger, so I change her and start her on a bottle, but the milk just won’t go down. Something is going on. She’s clamoring for the bottle, she’s pulling milk into her mouth, and she’s riotously upset every time I take the bottle away, but she keeps letting all the milk run right down her chin. She doesn’t need to burp. It’s not her diaper. I’m not sure what else could be wrong, so after awhile, I give up on the bottle and get her into what has become my standard soothing-a-gassy-baby position. It’s basically a human swaddle.
I settle Derek Jr.’s shoulder in the crook of my right arm, my hand reaching down to grab hold of her right thigh and pull her knee up toward her belly. With my left hand, I give her a pacifier and press her right arm across her chest, then I turn my right arm to press her into my body so that her face is buried in my chest, which holds the pacifier in place. When it works, this position soothes her instantly, though she still pulls frantically at the pacifier. It takes a good 20 minutes for her to work through the gas, and then, suddenly, she relaxes. Not only is she hungry, but she wolfs down the entire the bottle and falls promptly to sleep. I settle her on my shoulder to burp her gently, and I pull out my phone to check what happened in baseball today.
Tomorrow — well, today I guess — is my first official day back at work. I spent the morning preparing this journal’s introduction and first installment for editing, then going through my wife’s camera roll looking for images I could use. I found pictures of myself from the day Derek Jr. was born. Parents are strongly encouraged to give the baby as much skin-to-skin contact as soon as possible. It’s good for bonding and it promotes the release of oxytocin, so there I am in the hospital room wearing my FanGraphs hoodie with no shirt underneath, feeling supremely silly, the zipper cold against my chest. It never really worked out, though. Derek Jr. just wasn’t comfortable being against my chest that way, and I felt like I’d failed. I’d forgotten about that until I saw the pictures this morning.
Tonight, my wife and I only had an hour or so of free time between getting Derek Jr. down to sleep and going to bed ourselves. My going back to work will be enough of an adjustment, so I didn’t want to force her to spend her one hour of relaxation time watching baseball. We put something else on the TV while I perused the leaderboards looking for something to write about tomorrow. As a result, I still have no idea what happened during tonight’s games. What I missed was Houston’s Tatsuya Imai, Steven Okert, and Alimber Santa combining to no-hit the Rangers. With Derek Jr. still asleep on my shoulder, I pull up the highlights. They are hilarious.
It’s got to be one of the sillier no-hitters in history. The highlight package starts in the first inning, with no outs and two Rangers already on base, because apparently Imai walked the first two batters of the game. He only strikes out two, and aside from a couple popups, every ball in play seems to fall into one of two categories. Either center fielder Jake Meyers is running down what looks off the bat like a surefire double in the gap, or a middle infielder is standing on his head to corral a hard-hit grounder that appears destined either to fracture Imai’s tibia or end up in center field.
Imai started the season (and his MLB career) in disastrous fashion. He went on the IL with arm fatigue, got shelled in one of his two rehab appearances, then got shellacked in his first start back in Houston. He came into the game with an 8.31 ERA and -0.2 WAR. Tonight, he walked twice as many as he struck out and had a 50% hard-hit rate. The Rangers walked fewer batters and allowed only one more hard-hit ball than Imai did, and they got lit up for nine runs. The Astros didn’t throw a single offspeed pitch or curveball all night. Aside from four sinkers from Imai, every pitch was either a four-seamer or a slider. Somehow, that didn’t help the Rangers much. Maybe this is what I should write about tomorrow.
A minute or so into the highlights, Derek Jr., still asleep, does sort of a reverse bear crawl from my shoulder down to my chest. She settles with her knees on my lap and her torso pressed against mine, her head resting sideways just below my chin. It’s a position both the teachers of a parenting class and the nurses at the hospital encouraged us to use, as it allows for maximal skin-to-skin contact. They made it sound special, and I was excited for it. I’d seen other people hold their babies that way. It’s why we have those dumb pictures of me holding Derek Jr. with no shirt under my hoodie. But I couldn’t make her comfortable that way, and I gave up. All of a sudden, two months later, it’s where she wants to be. After a rough afternoon and night, she’s finally comfortable and happy, her warm little body pressed against me. She gets so tense when she’s upset; sometimes we lift her up from the crib and her whole body is stiff as a board. But she’s relaxed now. The highlight package is long, and as I watch the Rangers smash the ball every which way except into some grass, I’m overwhelmed by gratitude for the chance to have this moment with Derek Jr. melted against me. Maybe it’s the oxytocin.
I shouldn’t be up writing this. I’ve mortgaged two hours of sleep to document this moment, and I have to be up in three-and-a-half more to write about how James Wood can’t seem to figure out which pitches to challenge. If Derek Jr. wakes up right now — which could absolutely happen — I’ll be doing so on very, very little sleep. That’s been the tradeoff of this whole project, though. I can make sure we never forget all of these special moments, but only if I’m willing to lose some sleep in the night and be a bit more of a zombie during the day. I don’t know how much longer I can keep it going now that I’m going to be spending my days writing. It’s certainly felt worth it so far, and I’ve been so lucky to have had this time, to have such an amazing job that lets me write this journal at all.
Here’s one thing that I haven’t been able to document, that I don’t think I’ll be able to document fully. I’ve written a lot about what it feels like to have Derek Jr. asleep in my arms in the rocking chair in the middle of the night. It’s the most special thing I have. It’s my time to be close to her, to share my warmth, and to know that I’m taking care of her as well as I possibly can. I sing to her. I tell her how loved and beautiful she is. I crane my head down to look at her perfect face, and then I tilt my head back until I’m looking at the ceiling (my God, does that hurt, by the way) and try to burn the image into my memory. But I can’t do it. My brain just doesn’t work that way. I can’t hold onto it, and there’s no way to take a picture of it. I know I’m going to forget this image. It is the most precious thing to me, and I’m going to lose it. In some sense, I’ve lost it several times already; too slowly for me to notice, it must have changed so much as Derek Jr. has grown and grown over the past two months. No matter how tightly I hold her, so much slips away. So I stay up late. I put it into words as best I can. I get through the day.
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 23
Today marks my first time leaving the house for more than an hour or two since Derek Jr. was born. I’ve got band practice, and then the band is going out to a bar to watch the game. I don’t tell anyone, but I’m so out of the loop these days that I have no idea what game everyone is talking about. The timing couldn’t be worse, and that turns out to be the theme of the evening.
I feed Derek Jr. and put her down for a nap right before I head out, but she wakes up with horrible stomach trouble as soon as I leave. Band practice is two hours long, and my wife spends the entire time soothing Derek Jr. Band practice is a delight, as always. It’s extraordinarily loose. I haven’t touched a guitar in months, but nobody else has been practicing either, and it’s not like we need to be ready for a show or anything, so nobody minds much when a song goes off the rails. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 21
So Jose Siri made the coolest play I’ve seen in a while. He’s on the Angels now, a fact I had missed entirely, even though I now realize I saw him pinch-running against the A’s just two nights ago. When you think about Jose Siri, you think of great center field defense (and one million strikeouts), but that great center field defense usually comes in the form of great jumps and fantastic athletic catches. Tonight, however, he racked up an out with a combination of savvy and a perfect, powerful throw. A’s right fielder Carlos Cortes hit a routine single back up the middle. There was nothing notable about that whatsoever, but the Angels must have a scouting report that says Cortes likes to take aggressive turns when he singles. Whoever wrote it deserves a raise.
Siri played the ball normally right up until the moment when he didn’t. He intercepted it at a slow jog. It looked like he wasn’t taking the threat of Cortes going for a double seriously, but what he was actually doing was baiting Cortes, while also allowing the slow route to let him field the ball with his momentum still pushing him to his left, toward first base. That way, when he came up firing behind Cortes, he was able to got everything he had behind the throw. First baseman Nolan Schanuel was clearly in on it too. He lurked in foul territory, out of view of both Cortes and the first base coach so as to avoid arousing any suspicion, then popped back onto the field in time to catch the throw and apply the tag.
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 20
Derek Jr. and I will be on our own for much of the day. My wife is planning on meeting up with a friend for a walk in the park, taking an hour-long call, and then spending a couple hours editing her novel. Things go beautifully at first. Derek Jr. naps for nearly three hours in the morning, during which time I do a little writing myself. I feed and change her when she wakes up, but the effort of having someone else feed and clothe her seems like it’s already tuckered her out. Such is the life of a baby.
I put her right back down to sleep and try to nap in the room with her, but I can’t sleep. My brain is still whirring from the writing I did earlier. So I grab the monitor and take a crack at mixing a children’s song I’ve been working on. It’s the last thing I recorded before Derek Jr. was born. Fittingly, it’s called “I’m Sleepy.” Read the rest of this entry »
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 18
The summer after my wife and I moved in together, we had a mouse in our apartment. We set traps everywhere we could think to put them, but no matter what kind of traps or bait I used, the mouse wanted nothing to do with them. After a couple days, I got desperate. I wanted to figure out exactly where the mouse was getting in so that I could close up the gap to keep it out. Failing that, I wanted to figure out where it was going so that I could set traps in the right places. So I propped up an iPad against the arm of the couch with its camera pointed at the kitchen, called it on FaceTime from my laptop, and brought the laptop into the bedroom and closed the door. Then I sat quietly, stared at my kitchen from the other room, and waited for the mouse to show up. Even as I was setting everything up, I recognized it as an act of madness. But it worked.
I didn’t glean much that first day. If I recall correctly, the mouse did eventually show up, but it turned out that the iPad didn’t have a good angle on its movements. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from or where it was going, only that it crossed the kitchen a time or two. Convinced that the concept was sound and the execution could be improved upon, I tried it again the next day. My wife was off work, so I explained that I needed her to hole up in the bedroom with me. She recognized it as an act of madness too, but she found it hilarious. She dubbed it Mouse TV, and she understandably shrieked when the mouse finally showed up. We watched and stifled our laughter as it nosed around the kitchen. It took a couple more days of Mouse TV to figure out where the mouse was coming from, plug the hole, and make sure that the mouse wasn’t coming back. My wife was tickled the whole time. Whereas I felt embarrassed and vaguely unclean about having a rodent in my home, she’d tell the story of Mouse TV to anyone who could listen. It has, somehow, become a fond memory. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 17
Yesterday, when Derek Jr. was fussy, my wife played a Black Eyes Peas song on her phone and bounced our daughter on a yoga ball. Today it became clear that she considered this to be a successful experiment and that it will be a thing in our household going forward. The baby is fussy. Let’s bounce her to that Black Eyed Peas song. On repeat. Day after day. The Black Eyed Peas playing in our home. This was not a path I could have foreseen. This is not a path I would have chosen. This already seems like it will not be a path I can escape.
While I’m feeding Derek Jr. in the evening, I catch the ninth and 10th innings of the Cubs and White Sox. The 10th inning is one of the most exciting I’ve seen in a while. The Cubs start with Pete Crow-Armstrong as the zombie runner, which already makes it must-see TV. The White Sox broadcast is apparently having some sort of kids’ day celebration, and all of the graphics have a distinctly Backyard Baseball feel to them. If you’ve never played the Backyard Sports games, then this will go right over your head, but as I watch, a realization washes over me: The speedy, lanky, left-handed, red-haired Pete-Crow Armstrong is Major League Baseball’s version of the speedy, lanky, left-handed, red-haired Pete Wheeler. I mean, come on:
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 15
Derek Jr. has another evening of gas trouble. She wakes up after my wife and I eat dinner, then spends 90 minutes alternately docile and racked by quick bouts of intense, outwardly inexplicable pain. It’s gone by 10 PM, and as I finish feeding her, we catch the end of the Phillies-Pirates game, then switch over to Giants-A’s. We are lucky enough to witness a rare sighting: Luis Arraez hitting a home run. Jeffrey Springs leaves an 81-mph changeup belt high on the inner half, and Arraez abandons his usual stay-back-as-long-as-possible-and-slap-it-the-other-way approach. He turns on the ball with a ferocious uppercut:
Usually, this is one of my very favorite things to witness: Arraez realizing mid-pitch that there is a ball he can absolutely pummel, and turning into a ferocious slugger all of a sudden. His hands are lightning quick. I wish I had a millisecond-by-millisecond breakdown of exactly what is going through his head leading up to this swing decision. What is it exactly that he sees, and what is it exactly that tells him, “Hey man, you know how you go up to the plate and look to do the exact same thing every single time? Well, we’re throwing that out the window right now. Friggin’ rip it.” I’ll always wonder what kind of hitter he’d be if he came up to the plate intending to do damage. Could he make it work? Might he be even better?
She just tooted. I’m gonna try to go to sleep. [So, uh, I was dictating this entry on my phone and my wife walked in, and I guess I forgot to turn off the speech-to-text function. Let’s just get back to Arraez.]
This time, however, I’m a little bit bummed. Last year, I started tracking something I call homerless qualifiers. A homerless qualifier is a player who qualifies for the batting title, but doesn’t hit a single home run all season long. It’s a really tough needle to thread, being good enough to merit 500 plate appearances without even a single homer, and it’s increasingly rare. However, with Arraez playing in San Francisco, I thought we had a great chance to see it. Power isn’t a part of his game anyway, and he should be able to pile up singles in that big park. His homers only ever come on balls like this one, where he turns and rips it down the line, and Oracle Park doesn’t reward that kind of behavior for all but the strongest left-handed sluggers. I figured it might discourage Arraez from turning on the ball entirely. But Sacramento is a different story, apparently. I guess now we’ll have to pin our hopes for a homerless qualifier on… Fernando Tatis Jr.?
May 15
Derek Jr. only woke up once last night. My wife and I got something like seven hours of sleep. Seven hours! We are refreshed. We are renewed. We are reborn. Once Derek Jr. finishes her breakfast, we throw her into the stroller and head out to have a morning. It’s a beautiful sunny day. We pick up coffees and hit the park. It turns out the Brooklyn Half marathon is today. It’s in full swing, and as we approach the park, we can hear the cheers of the spectators from across Bartel-Pritchard Square (which is, in fact, a traffic circle and not a square at all). The jogging loop that circles the park is jam-packed with runners. In order to actually enter the main part of the park, we have to wait on the sidewalk for a few minutes along with all the spectators cheering on their half-marathoning friends. Finally, I see an opening. I turn to my wife and tell her to follow very close, then I charge through the gap, pushing the stroller ahead of me like a fullback on Supermarket Sweep.
We rattle the stroller down the walking path and settle on some benches with a good view of the morning’s Little League action. It turns out it’s picture day. Team after team masses on our right, poses for their photos, then disperses. I can only imagine the chaos all these hundreds of little kids caused as they tried to weave through the packed half marathon traffic.
On the grass right in front of us is a team of six- or seven-year-olds in green uniforms. Their game today must be scheduled awkwardly in relation to their team photo, too close to leave and then meet back at the field later, but too far off to do anything other than sit around waiting. With time to kill, their coach gets a drill going. The players line up in single file, he rolls the one in front an unbelievably slow grounder, and the player fields it and throws it back to the coach. But again, these are six- or seven-year-olds. Not one of them actually fields the ball cleanly. Not one of them throws a catchable ball back to the coach. He is completely unperturbed, waiting patiently as each player chases down their ball and then not minding a bit when it’s his turn to chase down each wild throw. I’m antsy just watching it, but he has the patience of a saint.
The real action is on Field 1, to our left. It’s a game between 10-year-olds, the Red team against the Blue team. As Derek Jr. snoozes and my wife and I chat, I keep a loose eye on the game. The first ball in play is a routine fly to left field, but again, these are 10-year-olds. The Blue left fielder warbles unsteadily toward the approximate landing spot of the ball, his glove hand already reaching up to the sky. The hang time can’t be more than two and a half seconds, but it stretches out for an eternity. You can feel every single person at the field — players, coaches, parents, even the bored siblings — holding their breath and wondering whether this kid can actually do the impossible and catch a baseball. It’s high drama at 8:45 AM on a Saturday, and he nails it. He nails it! The ball smacks into his mitt and sticks, and the crowd goes wild. F7.
We only see two more balls that even make it into the outfield, both off the bat of some enormous kid on the Blue team. Because the ball rarely even makes it out there, the outfielders are only stationed a few feet onto the outfield grass, but twice, this kid smacks the ball a good 40 feet over the head of the Red left fielder. Both times, it rolls directly into a picnic, and both times, this poor kid has to navigate snacks and blankets in order to retrieve it. By the time the world’s slowest relay begins, the giant Blue kid has already scored and is back on his bench panting.
We have a great time on the benches. Derek Jr. wakes up happy, and we feed her and play with her and snap a million pictures.
We need to change a couple diapers on the park benches. It’s the first time we’ve done so in public, and it turns out that they’re angled more steeply than we realized, but once we figure out how to keep our baby from rolling off the back, it goes just fine. And as it turns out, her poopy diapers aren’t even the most disgusting thing in the vicinity. After a while, an old man takes a seat on the last bench in the row, two down from us. He’s wearing a bucket hat, a button-up, khaki shorts, and sandals. Have I painted the picture? He looks exactly how you’d expect a kindly older gentleman who spends his Saturdays enjoying the fresh air in the park to look. Then he removes the sandals and starts clipping his toenails.
It is so loud. It is so weird. And it takes him so, so long. I have lived here for my entire adult life and I assure you that I have seen some stuff, but I’m ready to call it. This is the grossest thing I have seen in New York City. The other gross things I’ve seen have always been, at least to some extent, accidents. Sometimes nature calls at an inopportune moment. Sometimes nature causes a gigantic rat to drop dead on the sidewalk directly in front of your front door. But this man left the house with clippers in his pocket. This is a premeditated act of domestic terrorism, on picture day of all days. We move all the way down to the farthest bench. It is still loud.
Back home, Derek Jr. goes down for a nap, and I flip on the Orioles-Nationals game. The first thing I notice is that the billboards behind home plate at Nationals Park are advertising a dumpster company. Given the way the Nats have played over the past five seasons, it’s maybe a tad on the nose:
Then the billboards get weirder. Adley Rutschman’s gold catching helmet perfectly matches the Bet MGM ad that’s behind home plate in the bottom of the seventh inning. Actually, the Bet MGM ad isn’t behind the plate. It’s digitally superimposed over the physical ad behind the plate, which is for a new motion sickness drug. Also, it’s digitally superimposed very shoddily.
The ball blinks and glitches the whole way to the plate. Also blinking on and off the screen are the bat, the sliding mitt in the batter’s back pocket, and even the pitcher’s face. It’s disorienting to watch, but I suppose it’s impressive that someone found a way to make gambling ads even less palatable. Maybe this is all just an elaborate ploy to sell more of that anti-nausea medication. I miss the dumpster ads:
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 12
Today was the first time I left my wife to put Derek Jr. down to sleep on her own. My friend Michael Clair had an event for his book about the Czech national baseball team, and after watching him pour everything into this book for years, there was no way I could miss it. It was a great time. Jay Jaffe hosted, so I got to chat with him, Mike and his family, and a couple other cool baseball people I’d never met before. But it was also a disorienting experience.
It started with a tactical error on my part. On my way from the subway station to the bookstore, I passed an old Polish bakery and couldn’t help ordering one of the poppy seed buns in the window. When the clerk reached for the display, I realized that the buns were way, way bigger than they looked from the outside. I was now a block and a half away from the event, holding a bun the size of my face inside a crisp paper bag. Because I am a fool for baked goods, and because I didn’t want to distract everyone by crinkling the bag for the entire event, I did what had to be done. I stuffed the entire face-sized bun into my face during the three-minute walk to the bookstore.
I sat up front next to Mike’s wife, and as the event got going, I felt my baseline exhaustion combine with a massive carbohydrate crash. It was not ideal. It also felt so strange to just sit there without having anything else to do. Nobody needed me. There were no chores to do, no way I could help out. It was probably the first time in a month I’d worn jeans rather than basketball shorts. My wife had encouraged me to go out and have fun without worrying about her and Derek Jr. I suppose it should have been a relaxing feeling, but I just wasn’t ready for it. Once the Q&A ended and I’d gotten in a few minutes of small talk, I fairly ran out of the bookstore and back to the subway. Read the rest of this entry »
