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 »

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 11
Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and I thought that would be the theme of my entry. I wasn’t actually planning on writing about my wife, though. I was planning on writing about her friends.

This isn’t my story to tell, but my wife has had a really difficult life. She’s had to overcome more than anyone I’ve ever known, and she’s had to work very hard to get where she is. Part of the reason she’s made it so far is that she has built an amazing collection of friends stretching all the way back to preschool. She is kind and outgoing and selfless. She is an incredibly supportive friend, and now that she could use some help herself, she’s got an army behind her. One friend was waiting at our apartment to help out when we got home from the hospital. One checked an enormous suitcase of hand-me-downs the last time she visited. One had a baby nine months before us, and when we visited her over the winter, she sent us home with a bag of clothes and a trunk full of fancy baby gadgets we never would have thought to get ourselves. Another made a mobile for Derek Jr. by hand and is scouring the Buy Nothing app for free diapers and baby supplies. Another is visiting town — from Europe — for two weeks and coming over most days to cook for us and do laundry. Those who can’t visit have sent gifts and FaceTimed the baby.

I have been really moved by the support I’ve gotten from my own friends, but this is something else entirely. My wife has put so much good into the world, and the world is taking this opportunity to show how much it is appreciated. It’s overwhelming evidence of a life lived right. Anyway, that’s what I thought I was going to write about. Or maybe this onesie that my wife has been saving for Mother’s Day. Instead we’re going to talk about the injured list. 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 9
We have a delightful new tradition in our apartment called Family Nap. When Derek Jr. goes down to sleep in the middle of the day, my wife and I do the same. The whole family naps. It’s a Family Nap. We really need it today. I didn’t get much sleep during the early shift, then at 6:30 AM, I handed Derek Jr. off to my wife, who didn’t get all that much more sleep than I did because she was up twice pumping. Something in your body rebels at going to bed — not as a nap, but as a regular part of your sleep — as the sun is rising. I wake up three hours later and Derek Jr. is already down for her first nap of the day, so my wife encourages me to try for a little more sleep. I give it my best shot, but when I get back into bed, something is wrong with my equilibrium. Every time I close my eyes, it feels like I’m rocking in the rocking chair. It strikes me as a worrisome development.

In the afternoon, Derek Jr. blows out two diapers as violently as anyone has ever blown out a diaper — she’s a hurricane; they’re the roof of the Trop. At some point in the last couple weeks, I wrote down a note for this journal that says, “Blowing out a diaper is like a ringing double.” However, after checking with some friends, it turns out that I didn’t actually know what the definition of a ringing double was. Maybe I’ll write about that later and leave the shredded diapers out of it.

The blowouts have depleted our supply of onesies. We’re down to our last one, a tie-dye number of indeterminate origin. Hurricane Derek Jr. doesn’t seem to mind it, and after all her hard work, she decides she’s earned some sleep. As she drifts off in my arms, my wife and I make the momentous decision to follow suit. It’s a genuinely exciting prospect. When I said earlier that Family Nap was a tradition, I may have been overstating things a bit. It’s more of a vision at this point. It’s a dream of a better future.

When you have a baby, people tell you all the time that you have to sleep when the baby sleeps. That’s what they say: “You have to sleep when the baby sleeps.” And they’re right. You have to sleep when the baby sleeps. But you also have to do the laundry. And the dishes. And you have to boil water for formula and sterilize the baby bottles and pacifiers. You have to cook and eat and shower and go to the pharmacy and get groceries, and wow, we’re way behind on thank-you notes, and pay the bills, when’s the last time you shaved, and get on the phone to dispute another denial from Goddamned UnitedHealthcare, and try to do at least a bare minimum of tidying up if only so that you don’t feel like you live in a Babies “R” Us that just got hit by a tornado, and then, after all that, maybe, just maybe, you can unwind by taking a nice, calming, deep breat – nope, the baby is awake and crying. Deep breaths will have to wait.

Today, though, we’re doing it. I transfer Derek Jr. to the crib, we get a load of laundry going, and, whispering so as not to wake the baby, my wife starts a chant: “Fam-ly Nap! Fam-ly Nap! Fam-ly Nap!” I suppose this one shouldn’t technically count because we’re not all going to sleep in the same room, but the spirit of Family Nap blazes in our hearts. I sleep in Derek Jr.’s room so that if she wakes up early and needs attention, my wife can keep sleeping. It’s a good call. Derek Jr. got around 20 minutes of sleep in my arms, but she only gets about 20 or 30 more in the crib, so the family portion of Family Nap is very short. I lift her out of the crib, rock her back to sleep, and pull up the Angels-Blue Jays game on my phone with the volume turned all the way down.

It’s the bottom of the second inning, and I’m just in time to catch a rarity: back-to-back infield singles very nearly hit to the same spot. I tend to think infield singles don’t get enough credit for all the excitement they provide. During an infield single, the entire infield buzzes with action. The batter is sprinting to first as hard as they can, the fielder is getting everything they possibly can on the throw, and the first baseman is stretching as far as their meaty legs will allow. But those are just the main characters. The action around them spins on: The catcher hauls it up the line in full gear to back up the play, the other fielders rotate over to cover their own bags, the umpire gets in position to make the call, the outfielders (occasionally) back up the play. And with the whole infield awhirl, it usually comes down to a bang-bang play at first, at which point the stadium explodes with opinions because everybody is 100% sure they know whether the runner was safe or out.

The first infield single does not exactly prove my point. Daulton Varsho chops one up the middle, about 10 feet to the right of second base. Second baseman Vaughn Grissom is shifted over towards first base for the pull-happy Varsho, so he has to race to his right. Varsho isn’t a burner, but he’s fast enough and he has a head start by virtue of his left-handed swing, so Grissom has to attempt a more difficult play, a sliding catch that will allow him to pop up, plant hard, and fire toward first with a lot on the throw. But he botches the catch part, and as it turns out, that was a load-bearing part of the plan. I don’t mean to make it sound like Grissom really messed up here. He didn’t have the luxury of reading the ball and picking a convenient intercept point; he just had to run to the spot, and he got stuck with a tricky in-between hop. That makes the play more difficult than it looks. Still, in an earlier time, the play probably would’ve gone down as an error.

Righty Ernie Clement is up next, so Grissom is playing about 15 feet farther over toward his right than he was for Varsho. Unfortunately for him, Clement hits a worm-burner about 15 feet farther to Grissom’s right than Varsho’s ball was. This one skids off the third base side of the mound, and once again Grissom races over for a sliding stop. He gloves the ball and glances toward second base to force Varsho out, but shortstop Zach Neto was playing deep in the hole and Varsho is going to beat him to the bag. Playing to pull has really hurt the Angels this inning. Grissom gets his left knee under him, pops up, and digs deep, turning his body into a trebuchet in order to get as much as he can on the long throw to first, but it’s not enough. Clement stomps on the bag with the ball still a yard away – I’m sorry; as we’re playing in Rogers Centre, I should have said a meter – his arms spread wide. He’s not all that sure that he actually beat the throw, though. As he chops his steps to slow down, he looks toward the umpire and lowers the angle of his arms slightly. It’s the body language version of replacing the exclamation point after his original “Safe!” signal with a question mark:

More importantly, Dylan Cease is still letting the hair grow. He’s no longer Drabecking. Comparisons are honestly failing me. He’s got so much hair and his mustache is so very thick. I can’t decide whether he looks more like he’s in some sort of 1970s disguise, like he’s an extra from the fight scene in Anchorman, or like he’s one of Alexandre Dumas’ musketeers:

I missed the first inning, when Trey Yesavage struck out Mike Trout on a splitter. But I get to see him whiff Trout again in the third, and it’s cold-blooded. Trout came into the game ranked in the top 10 in WAR and wRC+, but Yesavage has him in a blender. The first pitch is a splitter on the outside edge for a called strike. The second is a fastball six inches lower, right on the corner of the zone, and Trout fouls it off for strike two. The third pitch is a slider six inches below that one, dropping down and out of the zone for a swinging strike three. Called strike, foul, whiff. Three perfect pitches in three perfect spots. It’s ruthlessly efficient, maybe the most impressive thing I’ve seen this season (aside from Cease’s hair):

At that point, Derek Jr. has been asleep for awhile, so I figure maybe I can deposit her back in the crib. She’ll get some more sleep, and I’ll head into the family room and watch the game on an actual television screen for once. We’re taking big swings today. My read of the situation is that her sleep is in a tenuous place. I don’t think I’ll be able to keep her asleep during re-swaddling and resettlement in the crib, so I try something I’ve never tried before: I just put her in the crib with no swaddle. I don’t even pull the tie-dyed onesie back down over her belly. I just get her in the crib, still asleep, her limbs splayed willy-nilly. I don’t think she’s going to sleep that much longer anyway, so what’s the worst that could happen?

Approximately two seconds after I get the game up on the TV, I find out. I glance over at the monitor, and her crib looks like it’s full of thrashing eels. Her pacifier has fallen out, waking her up, and with no swaddle to keep her calm and motionless, she’s kicking her legs and waving her arms at warp speed. She looks like she has about eight limbs and they’re moving so fast you could make a smoothie in the crib. I’ve never seen anything like it. It would be mesmerizing if it weren’t my job to keep her from turning into a tiny human blender. I pick her up and soothe her, then bring her out to watch the game. We take in a couple more minutes before my wife wakes up. Family Nap is officially dead, and it’s time to feed Derek Jr. and start the cycle all over again.

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 8
I’ve spent so much time writing about burping here that I feel I owe some context to anyone who hasn’t spent much time feeding babies. I’m sure you know the basics of the exercise. You raise the baby to your shoulder and pat them on the back until they burp or spit up. Voilà: You have burped a baby. That’s not wrong, but I never really understood the whys and wherefores until the last couple weeks.

Before I get into it, I feel like I should apologize. I’ve always been staunchly opposed to public discourse about bodily functions. When I was a kid, I tended to define myself in opposition to my older brother, and that was his thing. I was a voracious reader; he could burp the alphabet. I mimicked Ken Griffey Jr.’s stance and Cal Ripken Jr.’s sidearm throwing motion; he learned to spit like a big leaguer. Now, of course, my life is sometimes exclusively focused on bodily fluids and diaper drama and coaxing monster burps out of the sweetest little baby you ever saw, then exclaiming “Oh-ho-ho!” and congratulating her on their grandeur. Somehow, I have turned into the guy who texts this to his wife:

So. Babies are born with immature digestive systems. Everything is difficult. They choke easily, things often don’t sit right in their stomachs, they get the hiccups constantly, and they tend to go to the bathroom while they’re eating. All of these issues are distracting and uncomfortable. In order to avoid pouring more milk on those already dicey situations, evolution developed a simple fail-safe: If something’s wrong, the baby just won’t swallow the milk. Sometimes they’ll stop pulling it into their mouth in the first place, but even if they’re ravenous and they’re sucking aggressively, they’ll then just let it pour right out of their mouths and down their round faces.

When you’re feeding a baby, you have to listen carefully for the adorable little piglet grunts that indicate that they’re swallowing. You learn to appreciate the nuances of those teeny-tiny gasps and grunts and harrumphs, all of which tell you whether and how well they’re getting the milk down. When a baby is eating successfully, it should sound a bit like a Rich Hill start — wait, no, that’s way too intense — rather, it should sound like Rich Hill having a gentle game of catch. Here’s an audio recording of Derek Jr. during a particularly aggressive mealtime. It’s…a lot:

You can hear her grunting and swallowing and gulping for air. You can hear the wind whistling through the vent in the bottle. At one point, you can hear the milk tumbling down into her stomach. And if you listen really closely, you can hear my wife and me trying not to giggle so loudly at her ferocity that we ruin the recording.

When you’re feeding a baby, you’re listening and you’re constantly keeping an eye out for milk pooling at the corner of their mouth or dribbling down their chin. Whenever you sense that the milk is no longer flowing into the tummy, it’s burp time. A nice, big burp will resolve whatever buildup of gas is causing their distress, or at the very least, give them some time to reset themselves and get ready to resume the meal. Essentially, there’s something in the way, and your job is to shake it loose.

You put the bottle down, lift the baby by the armpits and sling them over your shoulder, and pound them on their tiny back as hard as your conscience will allow. (No matter how hard that may be, it’s be a butterfly kiss compared to the thwacks of the nurses at the hospital, who could slap a burp out of a cinder block.) You rock back and forth, because aligning the alimentary canal so that it’s leaning slightly forward can encourage a burp. You alternate between patting on the back and rubbing firmly from the lumbar region up toward the shoulders. (It’s unclear to me whether this actually induces a burp, but it seems like it would feel nice, and that makes you feel better about all the back whacking.) You walk around and bounce the baby on your shoulder as you go. I sometimes do a little shuttle run across the apartment, or put on a song and dance around just for fun.

As you do all this, you can’t help but verbally encourage the baby to burp. Often, the baby is very hungry and therefore very upset that you’re interrupting their (unsuccessful) alimentation, so you end up simultaneously whacking them on the back, explaining why you’re denying them food, and pleading for a burp. I often find myself emphasizing the transactional nature of the relationship like a kid attempting to prize away a friend’s prize rookie card. “Look, you and I both know what you want, and we both know there’s only one way to get it,” I’ll cajole. “If you can think of another way to get food in your belly, by all means, have at it. You scratch my back, I’ll stop whaling on yours.”

Eventually you’re rewarded with a big burp, which is your signal that the baby is ready to eat again. The burps always come suddenly, which means they often elicit from you a cry of surprise and joy, at which point you congratulate the baby like she just won the Super Bowl. I used to despise the very idea of wasting my precious attention on something as crass as burping. Now here I am 30 years later, telling my daughter how proud I am every time she emits a window-rattling burp.

Bottle feeding tends to require much more burping than breastfeeding. [Note from the future: We have also discovered that Derek Jr. needs significantly fewer burps if we feed her bottles that are closer to room temperature rather than from the fridge. She doesn’t mind the cold bottles, but she has a lot more trouble with them. We’re still learning here.] As a result, I’ve spent more time burping Derek Jr. than my wife has. I’m more comfortable with it. Compounding that is the fact that burping can be more challenging when you’re breastfeeding. My wife likes to have a whole pillow situation set up around her, along with her water bottle (because breastfeeding dehydrates you) and her phone to track how long Derek Jr. is eating. That’s no big deal for standard issue burps, but if you need to stand up and dance around the apartment to dislodge a particularly stubborn one, you have to reconfigure the whole nest when you sit back down. I’m desperate to find ways to lighten the huge load my wife is bearing as she recovers from the physical trauma of the birth, deals with massive postpartum hormone shifts, and gives over so much of her time to nursing and pumping, so I often volunteer to jump in and do the burping in order to preserve the nest. I’m now the designated burper.

Once the baby is finished eating, she’s usually adorably drowsy, but you can’t put her down to sleep right away. She needs time to process all the milk she just ingested, which means staying at least somewhat upright. If you put her on her back right away, she’ll be extremely uncomfortable. Even if she does fall asleep that way, she’ll likely get the hiccups or spit up, which is both scary and uncomfortable. The spit-up will run down her cheek and spread in a wet circle on the sheets beneath her face.

When things go well, burping leads right into this upright period, and she’s sleepy putty in your hands. She’s adorable and calm, and your job is to sit there and admire this warm little bundle who has dropped into your life. It’s a special time, and I feel certain that it’s what I will remember most about these last several weeks. It’s also the time when I’ve done most of the writing in this journal and the reason that so much of what I’ve written has been so lovey-dovey. If you were sitting with your drowsy baby’s warm body pressed against your chest and your cheek, you’d be mawkish too.

I tend to give Derek Jr. 20 or 25 minutes to digest, during which time I sing or play music or hold my phone out of her line of sight and watch baseball. It’s nearly four in the morning right now, long after all the games are over, so in between songs, I’m watching highlights of Jacob Misiorowski mowing down the Yankees. He struck out 11 while throwing harder than any starter has ever thrown. I wish I’d seen the whole game, because I’m genuinely curious about how Les Miz is progressing as a pitcher. PitcherList gave his location a B- tonight and Stuff+ gave it a 141, both the best grades he’s gotten all year. That’s exciting. When you’re sitting 101 mph with the fastball and — good Lord — 96 with the slider, B- command should work out just fine. The curveball is the pitch that jumps out the most, because there’s just no way for a hitter to be ready for such an extreme change of pace:

The most important thing I glean from the highlights, though, is that Misiorowski is still locked in a fierce battle against his own hat. The topic for today is shaking things loose, and it definitely applies to him. Watch him closely and you’ll notice that he has to adjust his hat after every single pitch. Clad in the new Brewers City Connects — with “Wisco” across the chest in script, they look more than anything like a product placement for a chain of off-brand gas stations — he still sports the stiffest brim in the league. I swear you could use that thing as a ruler.

Speaking of rulers, the 6-foot-7 Misiorowski is long and narrow everywhere, including his head. The hat doesn’t quite reach his ears. No wonder the thing never gets broken in; he’s barely even wearing it! This is actually something I noticed last year, when Eric Longenhagen posted slow motion footage of Misiorowski’s delivery. Combine a significant head whack with the fact that the stiff hat is basically resting atop his dome like a yarmulke, and you’ve got a recipe for a hat that bounces all over the place every time Misiorowski throws:



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 7
In my brief glimpses of baseball today, I watched Oneil Cruz work a walk off Paul Sewald in Arizona, as well as the final three outs of the Mets’ loss to the Rockies. Cruz really worked the walk, which was fun to see. It was an eight-pitch plate appearance. Sewald missed well inside with the first pitch. Ahead in the count, Cruz was sitting fastball, so when Sewald located a sweeper in the bottom part of the zone, he took it for a strike without batting an eye. Then Sewald made a huge mistake, leaving a sweeper in the dead center of the zone. But Cruz was again looking for a fastball, and this time, he thought he saw it. He unleashed a mighty cut, so far in front of the ball that he didn’t even bother trying to slow his swing down in order to salvage some kind of contact.

The count was 1-2 and the rest seemed academic. Cruz came into the game with a 34% strikeout rate. So did Sewald. Put it all together, and – forgive me if my math is a little fuzzy here – this situation seemed like it would end in a strikeout approximately 240% of the time. But Cruz managed to lay off a backdoor sweeper that missed the corner by an inch or so. It was the one really great take of the plate appearance. Two-two. Sewald got him to chase a fastball way upstairs (and way upstairs on Oneil Cruz means up near the press box), but Cruz just barely got a piece. Sewald missed wide with another slider to make the count full, and then Cruz got another little piece of another high fastball, this one located perfectly at the top of the zone. It was the best swing of the plate appearance, and when Sewald missed well wide on the third 3-2 pitch, Cruz had really earned his way to first. He doesn’t have the greatest eye in the world – three of these balls were very easy takes, and one of his swings was on a ball nearly a foot above the zone – but what more can you ask than a patient approach early on, one good take, one good foul, and an aggressive swing when he thinks he sees his pitch?

In Colorado, Antonio Senzatela did his best to make a 6-2 game interesting, walking the leadoff batter and allowing a bloop single to the second hitter. Then he settled down, striking out Francisco Alvarez on four pitches and MJ Melendez on three, before inducing a weak popout from Vidal Bruján. Melendez is now down to a 79 wRC+ on the season and Bruján has a career wRC+ of 54. These cannot be the hitters the Mets want coming to the plate in big situations, but that’s not my main focus as I watch the inning unfold. My main focus is on the girl in the pink puffer jacket behind the right-handed batter’s box, and her focus is on trying to figure out how to wipe her hands with a napkin:

Baseball really does have something for everyone. Truthfully, though, I’m vamping here. None of this is what I need to talk to you about. I mean, sure, I enjoy watching Oneil Cruz do just about anything, and it’s always fun to watch somebody learn about the magic of napkins, but we need to talk about something more important.

It’s two in the morning and I’m feeding my daughter. I’m typing this on my phone with one hand because I just noticed that her pajamas feature squat, heavy-set little mice playing musical instruments in some sort of mouse marching band. I think they’re wearing berets, because, I think, they’re French mice. They’re lined up in twos and threes playing a tuba or a trumpet or a drum or a tambourine. One even seems to be playing a lute, and now that I’m looking closely, I see a triangle, maracas, an accordion, and one mouse who just seems to be doing gymnastics. These mice are definitely French. But what gets me is that there’s one mouse playing a saxophone. That, my friends, is a bridge too far:

If you want me to believe there’s a mouse playing a tiny trumpet, making a tiny embouchure with its tiny little mouse snout, and tootling out a trebly “When the Saints Go Marching In,” then sure, what the hell, I can hang in there with you. I can even swallow the idea of a mouse playing the lute with its weird mouse paws. But I refuse to believe that mice are playing reed instruments. Do you know how hard it is to play the saxophone? And who is making these microscopic reeds? You want me to believe that the mouse is carefully wetting the reed just the right amount before clamping it back into place and launching into the solo from “Born to Run?” I’m out! You have officially lost me. This world you’ve created is structurally unsound, and it will collapse under its own obscene weight:

At the beginning of each procession is a mouse holding what is almost certainly a banner, but there’s a 10% chance that it is not a banner and is, in fact, a giant, crooked scythe. I like that possibility better. This isn’t a marching band after all. This is Death coming to bear his next victim to the mouse netherworld. And in the Mouse World, Death is dressed like a mime and accompanied by his friend Gary, who is going through a messy divorce right now and really having a time of it. One night, a gruff mouse driving a beat-up van unceremoniously dumped a huge pile of bric-a-brac from what was formerly a joint storage unit in Gary’s driveway, and as he picked through the wreckage of his freshly-shuttered past life, Gary uncovered the alto sax he used to play in high school. Gary couldn’t afford a convertible or a hair transplant, so he threw himself into his rusty old sax with everything he had, then convinced his buddy Death that maybe the journey to the afterlife deserved the class and dignity of some smooth jazz. It is not going well.

Derek Jr. is very much asleep now, so please excuse me while I deposit her and her mouse army in the crib and try for a bit more sleep. Thank you for reading FanGraphs.

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 6
The exhaustion has finally hit.

This might sound odd, but I was never all that worried about the exhaustion. I‘ve suffered from insomnia since I was 18, and it has darkened every corner of my adult life. My first job out of college was as a marketing assistant at a law firm. Once, after a particularly rough stretch of sleepless nights, an associate came into my office (a closet that I shared with a janitor) to assign me some work. After one look at my ravaged face, a knowing grin spread across his. He clearly had more fun than I did when he was 23, and he assumed that I’d been out all night partying. “I remember those days,” he said wistfully. Imagining the debauchery that could have left me so haggard was bringing him so much joy that I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth. Not only had I not gone out and painted the town red last night, I had gone to bed before the sun had even gone down, hoping that if I stayed in bed for 12 hours, maybe I could scrape together eight hours of sleep in bits and pieces. Needless to say, it hadn’t worked.

All of this is to say that the exhaustion is crushing, but I feel like I’m about as accustomed to it as you can get. Earlier this year, after I suffered a particularly rough night, my wife would sometimes say, “We need to figure out your sleep before the baby comes.” I disagreed. I figured that I’d be so very tired that it wouldn’t matter. I’d travel so far into that undiscovered country that even the exhaustion wouldn’t be able to tag along, and I’d just pass out whenever the opportunity presented itself. That’s pretty much what happened — for the first month anyway. Read the rest of this entry »