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 20
Derek Jr. and I we will be alone most of the day. My wife plans to meet her friend for a walk in the park, take an hour-long phone call, and then spend a few hours editing her novel. Things go well at first. Derek Jr. he sleeps for about three hours in the morning, during which time I write a little. I feed and change him when he wakes up, but the effort of having someone else feed and dress him seems to have already taken him out. Such is the life of a child.
I put her back down to sleep and try to sleep with her in the bedroom, but I can’t sleep. My mind is still reeling from the writing I did earlier. So I grab the monitor and get involved in mixing the children’s song I’ve been working on. It’s the last thing I recorded before Derek Jr. was born. Appropriately, it’s called “Sleeping.”
This nap is short. Because Derek Jr. He spent most of the day in his dark room, I brought him out into the sunlight in the living room when he woke up. I hold him on my shoulder and we roll around the room to my song, and say “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House.” He is as good as ever. You know how when you draw a person with a crayon, you always run into trouble when you get to the hands because the crayons are too thick to get good detail, so to get five fingers you have to draw them wide open, and it looks like each hand has seven knuckles? That’s Derek Jr.’s hands. which are visible all the time.
You are not a FanGraphs Member
It appears that you are not yet a FanGraphs Member (or signed in). We’re not mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we’d like to point out a few good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Free Viewing! We will not mistake you for this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited topics! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles per month. Members are never cut off.
3. Dark mode and classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, the way you want.
5. One-click data export! Use our predictions and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove images from the home page! (Honestly, this doesn’t sound that good to us, but other people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. More Steam guesses! We have offer, percentage, and context neutral predictions available only to members.
8. Get the FanGraphs Walk-Off, a custom year-end review! Find out how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don’t fall prey to FOMO.
9. Weekly mailbag column, for Members only.
10. Help support FanGraphs and all of our staff! Our members give us valuable resources to improve the site and bring new features!
We hope you will consider Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize that this has been a very long marketing article, so we’ve removed all other ads from this article. We didn’t want to overdo it.
My wife comes back from her trip and finds me hanging around Derek Jr. circling the carpet like Fred Astaire, his cute cartoon hand in mine. My wife loves this song, too. You enter. We all dance. “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” is playing at my house and we’re all having a ball.
Then, suddenly, something goes wrong.
Derek Jr. he’s upset, and none of our usual tricks make him feel better for more than a minute or two. We think you might be dealing with gas, but I know for a fact that “It’s almost gas” is what you say when you don’t know what’s really wrong. We finally got him to quiet down a bit and my wife went into the room to get her phone. I bring Derek Jr. in the living room to catch the start of the Rangers-Rockies game, but his discomfort begins again as soon as Andrew McCutchen steps into the batter’s box on the first pitch. Something must be really wrong. I mean, who doesn’t love Andrew McCutchen?
I can’t find Derek Jr. to stop crying for more than a few seconds at a time. Parenting books have a word when you can’t get your baby to stop crying no matter what you do: It’s inconsolable. The more you read, the scarier that word becomes, and now I’m starting to hear its four, full-consonant words that send chills down my spine. Something is wrong, and I can’t comfort Derek Jr. It’s sad and frustrating and makes me feel powerless.
Now me and Derek Jr. we hid in his room with the door closed so that the crying would not destroy my wife’s phone. I whip her into the yoga ball and rock her in the rocking chair. I sing and dance and let him stare at the lamp for as long as he wants because he likes the lamp. Nothing helps for a long time. The only thing I haven’t tried is feeding him, but it’s too early to not feed him – we’ve found he does best if he waits three hours between feedings – and other than that, he hasn’t shown any of his normal hunger signs.
As soon as we hit three o’clock, I just grabbed the bottle. It’s the only thing left to try, and it turns out to be the right thing. He just relaxed. You fall asleep after the first ounce; it’s not something he usually does while drinking from a bottle. Surprised, he slowly drinks in silence. He was inconsolable after all. He just needed something my intuition told me to try first, and I feel stupid for not trying and cruel for letting him suffer.
When you’re preparing to have a baby, you know you’re going to make mistakes. Every parent makes mistakes. You know this because other parents have told you so. And then, completely uninhibited, they start telling you horror stories of all the worst mistakes they’ve made with their kids, and at the end of a story about, say, watching their kid split his head open on the pool deck, they start laughing. You do your best to smile at them because you think it’s funny too, even though you know in your heart that if you stare at them for 45 seconds instead, that laugh could turn into tears. Sorry, this section is out for me. I know I would make far worse mistakes than making my daughter wait half an hour for a bottle. But right now I feel like a monster.
Now that Derek Jr. snoozing contentedly, I pick up the game again on my phone. We’re in the fourth inning, and things are almost as bad in Colorado as they were in my apartment. Brandon Nimmo intercepts the ball between first and second bases, forcing shortstop Kyle Freeland to cover first base. These two players meet at first base with very different styles. Nimmo, lurching like a gremlin in his gray path, resolutely descends into a shambolic lynching that will, in his long retirement, be the first thing that comes to mind each time we hear his name. Freeland, in his white baseball cap, glides across the diamond and receives the first baseman’s throw slowly. The two reach for the bag at once, and the gremlin refuses.
To avoid the collision, Freeland pushes the bag and redirects himself to the top of the base, sending him into an awkward conference with first base umpire Alex MacKay. MacKay sees Freeland scrambling for him, but he needs to make a call on this bang-bang play, so instead of moving out of the way or leaving a certain spot, he hangs in there and plants his feet in preparation for contact. Freeland wraps MacKay in a hug to keep him from sending him to right field, but this act of mercy comes at the cost of self-preservation. His jaw smashes into MacKay’s shoulder as the referee holds out his hands to call Nimmo safe.
Then the phone rings. MacKay was wrong. Only Freeman clenched his jaw and made the wrong call. Although the Rockies pull this off, the Rangers have the last laugh. Whether it was because of the last hit to the head or not, Freeland gave up a single in the next at-bat, a homer to the batter after that, and another homer to the third batter. Decent human pinball got the worst of this exchange in almost every way. Leo Durocher must feel vindicated. I can’t help but wonder if MacKay feels responsible.
