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. This is the third installment of that series. You can read all of the entries here.

April 19
So we have this app on our phones where we track baby things. At our first doctor’s visit, the only things the pediatrician specifically told us to do were to feed Derek Jr. every three hours and to keep an eye on how many times a day she was peeing. That’s enough to make sure she’s not hungry or dehydrated. But several people recommended this app, and now we’re neck deep in it.

We track when Derek Jr. pees. We track when she poops. We track when she boths. We track when and what and how much and how long we feed her. A few days ago, we started tracking her sleep too. You wouldn’t believe what other information the app wants; it has a color palette to choose from for each time your baby goes to the bathroom. I am not sure I like all this. (To be clear, I am very sure that I don’t like the part where the app wants to know what color the baby’s poop is. That’s between her and her god, the Diaper Genie.) We’re new parents. All we do is think about the baby and, specifically, worry about the baby. Now we can feed our anxiety with something that presents itself as hard data. The app has totals and averages and graphs and charts. It all looks very certain and official. It could very reasonably be called inFantGraphs. 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. This is the second installment of that series. You can read all of the entries here.

April 17

Like any new parents, my wife and I spend a lot of time staring at our baby and talking about how beautiful she is. Of course we do. Evolution has programmed us to be completely overwhelmed by the baby’s beauty so that we don’t leave her on the doorstep of the nearest convent when we get fed up with the wailing and the sleepless nights and the relentless, unceasing, never-ending pooping. It has worked. We are ensorcelled. Derek Jr.’s future is wimple-free. But I’m starting to think it has hit my wife harder.

I say this because she has started to insist that Derek Jr. is “an objectively beautiful baby.” Objectively beautiful. You’re familiar with beauty, right? The thing that is, famously, in the eye of the beholder? Apparently one beholder knows better. It’s not enough that she thinks the baby is beautiful, and that everyone tells her all day long how beautiful the baby is. She now needs it to be proven empirically.

I used the word “insist” earlier because I have been pushing back ever so slightly on this one. I spend a whole lot of time analyzing players or trends, and it requires rooting out biases and confounding variables. Call me crazy, but I’m picking up on a possible conflict of interest here. I’m not prepared to get in a fight over this, but I have gently pointed out that the fact that my wife is throwing around the word “objectively” here is — objectively — hilarious. 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. This is the first installment of that series. The introduction can be found here.

April 13
It’s somewhere around 9:30 PM and Derek Jr. is asleep. I am, briefly, watching baseball for the first time since she was born two weeks ago. The Mets and Dodgers are in the eighth inning. The main thing I notice is Joey Gerber’s delivery. I’ve never heard of Gerber before, but my daughter is wearing a Gerber brand onesie, and I sincerely hope he’s the heir to that particular fortune. His leg kick is a joy to behold:

It would be a grave understatement to say that Gerber has a high-energy delivery. Brendan Gawlowski called him funky. Eric Longenhagen said he had an “odd, chicken wing arm action.” I’m inclined to go with Ricky Conti, who called the delivery “violent, with tons of effort and recoil.” When you think of a pitcher’s leg kick, you think of, say, Justin Verlander smoothly raising his knee up toward his chest, his lower leg pointed straight down toward the rubber. Even Juan Marichal’s legendary leg kick started roughly the same way. He raised his knee, and at first, his lower leg merely came along for the ride. What made the leg kick famous was that Marichal’s foot just kept on rising long past the point where other pitchers’ stopped. He reared way back, intimidating the batter with the bottom of his spikes, and catapulted down the mound, the ultimate tall-and-fall delivery. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. I have missed you. I have been on paternity leave for the past two months because — and I’m told this is the most common reason people go on paternity leave — my wife and I had a baby. Mostly, my wife had the baby while I said things like “You’re doing great,” and “I’m so proud of you,” and “Hey look, a baby,” but this is very much a team sport. Our free agent acquisition arrived loaded with tools like spiky hair, world-weary eyes, and a trapezoidal mouth with a cute little dimple just beneath it, but she’s a little short on big league experience. We’ll have to coach her up.

So now we have this baby girl. It’s unclear whether she’s a bouncing baby girl — we haven’t dropped her yet — but she certainly seems healthy enough. I’m looking at her right now. She’s sleeping in her crib all swaddled up like a salami. She is, as babies tend to be, adorable. She is also — and again I’m informed that this is standard — somewhat labor intensive.

While laboring over this novel life-form for the past two months, I have watched precious little baseball. I have done precious little anything other than care for my wife and child (or, as I am still getting used to calling it, my family). As a result, I am wildly underinformed about the latest developments in my field of expertise. The stray missives that reached my ears often left me with more questions than answers. Did somebody Monstars the NL East? Are we sure this is the same Ildemaro Vargas? When did all these bodies get so loose? Read the rest of this entry »