The Early Shift: An Introduction

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?

Out of the loop as I may be, I am constitutionally incapable of abstaining from making things. I have done some baking. I have mixed down the occasional song. And I have written about baseball, after a fashion. As I fed my daughter, or as I rocked her to sleep, or as she snoozed on the other side of the room, I kept a journal of observations, some about caring for her, some about the small snatches of baseball I’d managed to sneak in the cracks of the day, and some about the intersection of those two worlds. This is the kind of baseball writing I was able to do, and I would like to share it with you.

I tend to think my main job as a baseball writer is noticing. Sure, I have to crunch the numbers, and make the graphs, and hammer out the jokes, and put the actual words on the page (and then, at the very last minute, remember that I also need a headline and frantically try to come up with something that’s not so drab and uninspiring that it’ll make Michael Baumann embarrassed to even know me). That’s the work and it’s rewarding in its own right, but the noticing is the part that keeps giving. A couple years ago, Sam Miller wrote, “The explicit goal of that article, and probably the implicit goal of most of my articles, is to give myself/you a reason to pay attention to things so that we can grow to care for them.”

I have found this to be true over and over again. The act of noticing something and giving it my full attention — even if it’s something as silly as Jacob Wilson’s batting stance or Nick Madrigal’s habit of running halfway across the diamond before throwing the ball to first — rewires my brain. I care about it now. I look for it in the future and get excited when I see it. I’ve just added a small bit of joy to my life. And I think that’s what it’s all about. I think we’re supposed to go through this world looking for things to be passionate about. I think the greater and deeper your enthusiasms, the more connected you will be to the world around you and the more rewarding your life will be. “How intimately related,” wrote Wendell Berry, “how nearly synonymous, are the terms ‘love’ and ‘know,’ how likely impossible is it to know authentically or well what one does not love, and how certainly impossible it is to love what one does not know.”

Well, I have this baby and loving her is now my primary job in life. So I want to make sure I notice as much as I can. As you’ll read many times in the entries that follow, my wife and I wake up every day to a new baby, and we’re so worried that we’ll forget yesterday’s baby. Yesterday’s baby ruled! Our daughter grows so fast, and we want to remember everything we can about this special time in our lives. This journal was the best way I could think of to do that. It’s the story of our rookie season.

I’ll close with a few notes on what you’re about to read. The first entry is dated two weeks after my daughter’s birth, both because that’s the first time I caught any baseball and because I would not wish upon anyone the horror of peeking inside my head during that first feverish fortnight. As you might have noticed, I have not told you my daughter’s name. I think it’d be better to keep that off the internet, at least for a while. I will refer to her as Derek Jr., which is what my wife and I jokingly called her when she was still just a toolsy prospect on the complex. (It did not occur to me during my wife’s pregnancy to refer to my wife’s belly as “the complex,” which I now recognize as a catastrophic oversight.) Likewise, you won’t see her face, but I did my best to take photographs that I could share:

Next, this is presented as a journal and it is a journal — the vast majority of the entries were written in the moment, often in the wee hours of the morning while I was holding Derek Jr. in my arms after feeding her or immediately after I put her to bed — but it’s been polished and edited. It’s still a true story, but I don’t want to give the misleading impression that you’re sneaking a peak at raw diary entries. There were lots of days when I didn’t write anything, or didn’t watch any baseball, or, most frequent, when I wrote a sentence or two and then got interrupted by some baby emergency and never finished saying whatever it was I intended to say. For those days, I came back later and did my best to write what I remembered, or I filled in the gaps with general observations that had been sitting around waiting for a home.

Lastly, I should probably get ahead of something that may have already occurred to readers with keen memories. Around this time last year, I wrote a certain article. In that article, I pulled paternity list data and ran some numbers to test a hypothesis: Ballplayers tend to have babies right around Opening Day, because Opening Day falls roughly nine months after the All-Star break, during which time ballplayers are not getting as much rest as their strength and conditioning coaches might hope. The data bore out that hypothesis, and I had entirely too much fun coming up with euphemisms for those midsummer baby-related activities. As such, I feel honor-bound to point out that my own daughter was very nearly born on Opening Day and allow you to generate your own conclusions (and euphemisms).

And that’s about it, I guess. I’m back at work as of today, though I’ll take another few weeks off when my wife returns to her job toward the end of the regular season. I have no idea whether I’ll keep updating this journal now that I’ll be writing real articles every day; it’s hard to imagine I’ll have the time. Then again, it’s also all too easy to imagine the things I might never notice if I stop.