The Early Shift: April!

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.

My wife is encouraging me to crunch these numbers. She wants all sorts of answers. Derek Jr.’s sleep patterns, whether she likes being swaddled, how much she eats. Does Derek Jr. sleep better after breast milk or formula? She’s looking at one week of data and drawing her own conclusions. We want so badly to take care of Derek Jr., and here’s this shiny app promising solutions. I totally understand where my wife is coming from, and if I didn’t do this for a living, I might well be trying to coax connections out of this app myself. But there comes a time in every marriage when you have to channel Dan Szymborski:

I tell my wife it’s April. I tell her it’s way too early to draw conclusions. The sample size is vanishingly small, and all these data points are moving targets anyway given how fast our baby is growing. Besides, what exactly are you supposed to do with a chart that looks like this?

This time last year, Chris Bassitt was leading the league in pitcher WAR. By the time the playoffs rolled around, the Blue Jays didn’t even trust him to start anymore. OK, I don’t mention the part about Chris Bassitt, but my wife is receptive to the idea that we don’t have quite enough data to Moneyball our baby. Just like that, Dan Szymborski has saved another marriage.

April 20
So it turns out that my therapist is a Mets fan. I started going to therapy last year. I’m not good at it yet. One of the main things I want to work on is learning not to bottle things up so much. Progress is slow, because I have to share things in order to get anywhere — it’s therapy — and I’m here specifically because I have trouble sharing things. Today, however, I feel like we do a better job of getting somewhere.

I don’t normally talk about baseball during therapy, but at the very end of the session, I mention what I wrote about yesterday, that I am trying to avoid drawing too many conclusions about Derek Jr. this early in the game. To reinforce that point, I mention that she was very nearly an Opening Day baby, and if somebody tried to draw firm conclusions about baseball right now, I’d get to admonish them by shouting, “It’s April!” I’m actually getting up to leave as I say this. The session is over. I start to turn for the door, but my therapist says, “So as a Mets fan, I shouldn’t get too excited about MJ Melendez?”

I am flabbergasted. I have been seeing my therapist for something like six months now, and this is not just the most personal thing he has shared about himself, but the only personal thing he has shared about himself. He’s a Mets fan. “God, I hope he has his own therapist,” I think. (Later that day, I’ll relate this story to my friend Roger, who will make almost the exact same joke.) I’m out of the loop on Melendez, but I offer what I suppose is my professional opinion (maybe I should bill him for it): However well Melendez is hitting, don’t expect it to last.

I call my wife to ask if there’s anything I should pick up on the way home. There isn’t, but apparently Derek Jr. has had some sort of diaper disaster and will require her first real bath in the bathtub. It has to be a sponge bath because the last tiny bit of her umbilical cord hasn’t fallen off yet, but it’s a special moment, regardless of the fact that it was precipitated by undiapered events too gruesome to relate here, or the fact that Derek Jr. spits up all over my shirt right beforehand, then pees through her towel and onto my jeans immediately afterward.

That’s how it goes. It’s unbelievably messy. You’re tired and harried and everything revolves around fluids you’d rather not think about at all, but none of that stops the special moments from being special. In the middle of the night, after I’ve fed Derek Jr. and am sitting, exhausted, with her in my arms in the rocking chair, sometimes for hours as I wait out whatever secretions or emanations must erupt from her in order to get her to a place where I can swaddle her and put her down to sleep, I sing to her. I tell her over and over and over again how loved she is. When I throw her over my shoulder and try to pound out a burp on her lower back (not as firmly as they show you in the hospital, but as firmly as I can bring myself to do it), it brings her increasingly chubby cheek or her still-skinny flank in range for me to turn my head and broadside her with kisses before she returns fire by either burping or spitting up all over me.

After all the events of the day — my therapist’s revelation, Derek Jr.’s first bath, my ruined jeans — it isn’t even noon yet. It’s Patriot’s Day, so once I’ve changed my pants, I turn on the Red Sox-Tigers game as a morning treat. The first thing I see is Jack Flaherty walking in a run and cursing himself out. On the first play of the next inning, Roman Anthony gets fooled by a sinking liner to his right and makes the mistake of diving for it, turning a single into a double. I guess it’s just a messy day all around. Then I remember to check in on Melendez and I feel vindicated. Underneath his 219 wRC+, Melendez has a DRC+ of 76 and a ghastly 50% strikeout rate.

April 21
“You’re a real English muffin down there.”

This is something I say to my daughter as she squirms on the changing table and I attempt to decontaminate her various nooks and crannies.

The Mets have now lost 12 games in a row. Has anyone tried unplugging them, plugging them back in, and then getting them some better hitters?

April 23
People talk a lot about babies’ weird soft heads. The whole fontanelle thing seems really freaky. There’s just a big hole in the baby’s skull, direct access to their tiny brain, because of plate tectonics? That’s alarming! But when you’re getting ready to have a baby, everybody reassures you the whole thing is overblown. You take classes, read books, talk to the pediatrician and other parents, and every single one of them says it’s nothing to worry about. Just sensationalism. Then you hold your baby in your arms. Let me tell you something: Those people are lying to you.

The fontanelle is even freakier than you can possibly imagine. It’s weird, and it’s enormous, and it’s terrifying (and technically there are four of them, and the big one in front persists for 12 to 18 months). You can feel the big divot where the rest of her skull should be! You can see it! Here you are, your entire life has just been upended and reoriented toward protecting this other, supremely fragile life, and that life has an Achilles’ brain? When you look at the big depression in her head, you can’t help but visualize the scant few layers between the outside world and her frontal cortex. It feels like if you were to accidentally knock a cherry tomato off the counter, it might just travel straight through to the center of her brain and stay there. This thing is not overblown. The baby you’re supposed to keep alive has a kill switch on the top of her head. Little Bunny Foo Foo would end her in a second.

In somewhat related news, Oneil Cruz hit a home run tonight that not only hit the foul pole in Texas, but landed directly on top of it and then bounced into the upper deck. It just skipped right off like it was a stepping stone; like the universe put it there to make sure the ball reached its destination. Have you ever wondered about that old Irish blessing, “May the road rise to meet you?” Have you wondered why this particular blessing seemed necessary, since all roads rise to meet you (or else they wouldn’t be roads anymore, they’d be former roads that now dead end into bottomless pits)? Now it all makes sense; turns out this particular blessing was intended for notable Irishman O’Neil Cruz.

It was a delightful bit of visual poetry, and I feel somewhat miffed that the universe allowed this to happen when I was off-duty. I’ve missed plenty of cool baseball stuff this season, but this one is really my speed. It’s the kind of thing that would normally send me roaring to the keyboard. By rights, I should’ve pumped out 2,000 words, a song, and a little cartoon about it by morning.

Here’s the craziest part. Those of you with particularly long memories will know that although this seems like a one-in-a-million shot, it’s happened twice before in recent memory. Melvin Mora did it in 2008 and Marcell Ozuna did it in 2015. That’s three times just in the pitch tracking era, which makes it a roughly 1-in-30,000 shot. All things being equal, we should expect to see the next one in the 2030s. In the meantime, thank God the foul pole didn’t have a fontanelle.