Hello. While I was on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, not Derek Jr., but soon to be Derek Jr. You can read all the entries here.
May 15
Derek Jr. you have another night of gas trouble. He wakes up after my wife and I have dinner, and spends 90 minutes limp and in excruciating, unexplained external pain. It’s past ten o’clock at night, and as I finish feeding him, we catch the end of the Phillies-Pirates game, and switch to Giants-A. We are lucky to see a rare sighting: Luis Arraez hitting a goal. Jeffrey Springs leaves an 81 mph changeup belt up the infield, and Arraez abandons his usual stay-back-as-long-as-possible-and-slap-the-other-way approach. He opens the ball with a brutal uppercut:
In general, this is one of my favorite things to witness: Arraez seeing in the middle of the field that there’s a ball he can hit, and suddenly turning into a vicious slugger. His hands are lightning fast. I wish I had a millisecond-by-millisecond breakdown of what was going through his head leading up to this swing decision. What exactly did he see, and what exactly told him, “Hey man, you know how you step up to the plate and look to do the same thing every time? Well, we’re throwing it out the window right now. Friggin’ rip it.” I will always wonder what kind of hitter he can be when he steps up to the plate with the intention of doing damage. Can he make it work? Could he be even better?
He just clicked. I will try 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.]
However, this time I was sad. Last year, I started tracking what I call homeless players. A home run is a player who is eligible for the hitting title, but who does not hit a single home run all season. It’s a really tough needle to sew, being good enough to fit 500 plate appearances without a single homer, and it’s getting rarer. However, since Arraez is playing in San Francisco, I thought we had a good chance to see it. Power isn’t part of his game though, and he should be able to pile on the singles in that big park. His hosts have come up with 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 powerful left-handed sluggers. I saw that it might discourage Arraez from opening the ball completely. But Sacramento is a different story, obviously. I guess now we’ll have to pin our homeless game hopes on… Fernando Tatis Jr.?
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May 15
Derek Jr. you woke up just once last night. My wife and I slept for 7 hours. Seven hours! We are refreshed. We are renewed. We are born again. When Derek Jr. After he finishes his breakfast, we throw him in the stroller and we go out for breakfast. It’s a beautiful sunny day. We grab coffees and hit the park. Turns out the Brooklyn Half marathon is today. It’s packed, and as we approach the park, we can hear the cheers of onlookers across Bartel-Pritchard Square (which is, of course, a roundabout and not a square at all). The running loop around the park is full of runners. To actually enter the main part of the park, we have to wait on the side of the road for a few minutes with all the spectators cheering their friends running the half marathon. Finally, I see an opening. I turn to my wife and tell her to follow very closely, then I charge through the gap, pushing the slide in front of me like a fullback is on. Sweep the Supermarket.
We slide the controller down the aisle and sit on the benches with a good view of the morning’s Little League action. Turns out it’s photo day. Group by group they crowd to our right, represent their images, and disperse. I can only imagine the chaos caused by all these hundreds of kids as they try to get through the crowded half marathon road.
On the grass right in front of us is a group of six or seven year old children wearing green uniforms. Their game today should be planned in the wrong way compared to their team picture, too close for them to come out and return to the pitch later, but too far away for them to do anything but sit and wait. With time to kill, their coach gets a drill. The players line up one after the other, he rolls the one in front hitting the ground with an unbelievably slow foot, the player catches him and brings him back to the coach. But again, these are six or seven year olds. None of them score the ball cleanly. None of them throw a catchable ball back to the coach. He doesn’t get upset, he waits patiently as each player chases his ball and is a little oblivious when it’s his turn to chase each throw. I just watch it, but you have the patience of a saint.
The real action is in Movie 1, to our left. A game between 10-year-olds, the red team against the blue team. As Derek Jr. snooze and my wife and I talk, I always watch the game. The first ball in play is a standard fly to left field, but again, these are 10-year-olds. The green left fielder limps toward the dugout, his glove hand already reaching high into the sky. The hang time cannot be more than two and a half seconds, but it extends forever. You can hear everyone on the field – players, coaches, parents, even bored siblings – holding their breath and wondering if this kid can do the impossible and catch a baseball. It’s high drama at 8:45 AM on a Saturday, and you nail it. You nail it! The ball hits his pin and sticks, and the crowd goes crazy. F7.
We only see two more balls go wide, both by one of the older kids on the Blue team. Because the ball rarely goes out, the outfielders are stationed just a few feet on the outfield grass, but twice, the kid hits the ball 40 feet over the Reds’ left fielder’s head. Both times, it rolls right into the picnic, and both times, the poor kid has to leave with snacks and blankets to bring back. By the time the world’s slowest relay begins, the blue giant has scored and is back on his bench panting.
We have a good time on the benches. Derek Jr. he wakes up happy, and we feed him and play with him and take a million pictures.
We need to change a few diapers on the park benches. It’s the first time we’ve done this in public, and it turned out they were a lot higher than we realized, but once we figured out how to stop our baby from rolling over, it went well. And as it turns out, her poopy diapers aren’t the most disgusting thing in the area. After a while, an old man sits on the last bench in the row, two down from us. He is wearing a bucket hat, button down, khaki shorts, and sandals. Did I paint a picture? He looks as you would expect a kindly elderly gentleman who spends his Saturdays enjoying the fresh air in the park to look. Then she takes off her sandals and starts cutting her nails.
There is a lot of noise. It’s weird. And it takes him so, so long. I have lived here all my adult life and I can assure you that I have seen things, but I am ready to call you. This is the worst thing I have ever seen in New York City. Some of the worst things I’ve seen have been, at least to some extent, accidents. Sometimes nature calls at the wrong time. Sometimes nature causes a giant rat to fall to its death on the side of the road right in front of your front door. But the man left the house with a clipper in his pocket. This is an organized act of domestic terrorism, on a photo day of all days. We always went down to the farthest bench. It’s still noisy.
Back home, Derek Jr. he goes down to bed, and I watch the Orioles-Nationals game. The first thing I notice is that the billboards behind home plate at Nationals Park advertise a garbage disposal company. Given how the Nats have played over the past five seasons, it might be a mistake on the nose:
Then the billboards got weird. Adley Rutschman’s gold helmet is a perfect match for the Bet MGM ad 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 a visual ad on the back of the plate, which is for a new drug for motion sickness. Also, it’s highly ranked digitally.
The ball blinks and blinks all the way to the plate. Also flashing in and out of the screen is a bat, a mitt sliding into the batter’s back pocket, and even a pitcher’s face. It’s confusing to watch, but I think it’s amazing that someone found a way to make gambling ads even less disgusting. Perhaps this is all an elaborate ploy to sell more of that anti-nausea drug. I remember the dumpster commercials:
