William Liang-Imagn Images

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.

Gentle though I’ve been, I’ve apparently hit a nerve. Twice now, my wife has gotten off the phone with a friend and informed me that the friend agrees with her: objectively beautiful baby. After all, what could be less subjective than the opinion of someone whose options were: 1) Destroy a lifelong friendship by informing someone that her newborn baby is, in fact, a total uggo, or 2) Say “Uh, sure” and move on?

I’m able to get Derek Jr. settled in for her final bottle of the day on the earlier side again. It’s about 10:30 PM, so if I can get her down to sleep successfully once she’s done eating, then I’ll get to go to sleep at a normal human bedtime. As she starts in on the bottle, I pull up the Brewers-Marlins game, which is in the 10th inning. Unfortunately, Trevor Megill notches the game-ending third strike on Otto Lopez at that very instant. We flip over to the Reds and Twins, but once again, the game ends at the instant we arrive. We just catch Byron Buxton grounding into the 27th out. We are become death, destroyer of baseball. I put the phone away and feed Derek Jr. with no accompaniment, holding her warm little body in the crook of my arm as she pulls at the bottle and curls her tiny fingers around my thumb. She’s the most beautiful thing this world has ever seen. Don’t tell my wife.

April 18
A diaper situation wakes Derek Jr. up around 11:30 PM. I resolve that situation, get her settled and calm, resolve the inevitable second, even messier diaper situation, then feed her a bit more because all those diaper changes have awakened her enough to make her realize that she’s ravenously hungry.

She crushes the bottle of milk. It resembles something like an inverted keg stand. I pull up the Padres-Angels game on my phone. The Padres lead, 2-1, in the bottom of the eighth, but the Angels have two on and two out. If Jo Adell can notch a hit off Jason Adam, the Angels will at the very least tie the ballgame. More importantly, they’ll ruin my first chance to see Mason Miller, who is off to a historic start, striking out 77% of the batters he’s faced without allowing a single run in his first 9 1/3 innings.

Adam, I notice, barely has a pitching motion at all. He starts out like any other pitcher, holding his glove low against his belt like a respectable right-hander and following it with a traditional leg kick. His delivery even features a couple of old-school flourishes. He starts with his shoulders pointed toward home plate but his feet closed off, and he pats the ball against the palm of his glove before breaking his hands for good. After that, though, he’s got a hitch. There’s a weird pause in the delivery, and from there, all pretense is dropped. Following that normal leg kick, he just kind of puts his front foot straight back down. He barely bends his back leg. He doesn’t take much of a stride. His arm swing is nonexistent. He just stands up straight, rears back and raises the ball to his ear, and hucks it in there. He’s a nine-year veteran with a career ERA of 3.25, but he looks for all the world like he was converted from catcher some time this morning, like he’ll do his best to look how a pitcher is supposed to look at the beginning, but at a certain point, he’s got to throw the ball home and only knows one way to do that.

I keep feeling like there’s an apt analogy for Adam’s delivery, but I’m tired and can’t crack it. Adam does his job, inducing Adell to ground out twice to Manny Machado at third base, once on a ball a few inches foul, and then again on a fair ball. The inning is over. Miller is in line to come in for the save in the ninth. In the meantime, though, Derek Jr. has drained the last drop of the bottle, and after I burp her, she’s making it clear that she’s still hungry. If I’m going to watch Miller blow the Angels away, I’ll have to head to the kitchen, decant an ounce of formula into this bottle, and get back to the rocking chair before the top of the ninth is over, all while holding a rapaciously hungry, and therefore particularly squirmy, newborn. This is a tricky proposition, and while there’s a certain art to it, I can’t pretend it’s graceful.

During a visit with a lactation consultant, we were taught that the proper technique for burping a baby isn’t to raise them up to your shoulder and pat gently the way you see people do on television. Rather, we were encouraged to pound on Derek Jr.’s back with gusto, and taught to sling her up over our shoulder, to the point where her center of mass is nearly on top of our shoulder like a tiny human teeter-totter. An ancillary benefit of this more extreme positioning is Derek Jr. is pretty well balanced. If I lean my head against her tightly, the way you’d cradle a phone when you need to write down a message, I can — very carefully, and while bouncing slightly and using my most reassuring tone of voice to say that I respect her hunger and am doing my utmost to procure further sustenance with all the alacrity I can muster (it’s never too early to make sure she’s got a robust vocabulary) — use both my hands to open the fridge, unscrew the top off the bottle of formula I made earlier and the current bottle, pour one ounce into the current bottle, hold it up to eye level to make sure I’ve measured it right, replace both lids, put the first bottle back in the fridge, race back to the baby room, return to my seat in the rocking chair, and get Derek Jr. in position for another slurp, all within a half inning. By the time I return, there are two on and two out and the Padres have pushed the score to 4-1. I’m now in danger of missing out on Miller from the other direction. Should Fernando Tatis Jr. drive in a run here, it won’t be a save situation anymore and the Padres probably won’t bring him in after all. Luckily, Tatis goes quietly.

Once again, Derek Jr. absolutely houses her ounce, and by the time Miller is ready to blow away the Angels, she’s curled against my chest, fast asleep. She is the most perfect thing this world has ever seen. Miller, on the other hand, is uncharacteristically imperfect. He still slams the door on the Angels, holding them scoreless and striking out two, but his control is iffy. Yoán Moncada battles back from 0-2 and works a seven-pitch at-bat before shooting a single through the right side of the infield.

Vaughn Grissom has one of the most absurd plate appearances I’ve ever seen. He walks on four pitches. On two of the first three, he looks terrified of the baseball. The first pitch is a slider that misses inside. It’s not particularly close to Grissom, but he buckles like a high schooler who’s never seen a curveball that actually curves before. The next two pitches are four-seamers up above the strike zone; Grissom flinches a tiny bit at the first and a lot at the second. But the 3-0 pitch is yet another 100-mph four-seamer up above the zone, and this time, not only does Grissom manage not to flinch, he plays it nonchalant. He flips his bat behind him, then his shinguard, and trots off to first. Flinching at the first three pitches is totally understandable. Miller is firing bullets up around neck level; even a professional baseball player is allowed to be scared of those. But you can’t do that and then play it cool! Grissom has a career wRC+ of 82, and he spent the first three pitches cowering in terror, but now he’s Johny Walks-a-Lot.

After all that, Derek Jr. doesn’t stay down. I’m up with her for several more hours. She’ll sleep in my arms, but being put down or swaddled is enough to wake her up and make her uncomfortable. It’s a long shift, and at a certain point, rocking her there in the dark, I finally find the analogy for Jason Adam’s pitching motion. It’s how I feel as a parent right now, and how I imagine many parents feel. The preamble was convincing enough. We did all the things you do to get ready for having a baby. We read pregnancy books, then parenting books, we took classes, we found a pediatrician, we got rid of half our stuff, turned our tiny second bedroom into an adorable little nursery, and filled it with baby stuff. We felt like we were as ready as we could be. We were Jason Adam standing there confident on the rubber and showing off a smooth leg kick.

And then, three weeks ago, a nurse deposited a baby in my arms — just cleaned off the vernix, borderline forced me to cut the umbilical cord, and plopped her in my arms — and all of our carefully choreographed preparations revealed themselves to be hilariously inadequate. I don’t know how many books you’d need to read to actually be ready to care for a baby on day one, but it’s definitely more than you could fit in our apartment. No matter how lovely our nursery, we’re now Jason Adam halfway through his delivery. We’re actually in it, scrambling as we try to keep this baby happy and alive.