Isaiah J. Downing-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. You can read all of the entries here.

May 20
Derek Jr. and I will be on our own for much of the day. My wife is planning on meeting up with a friend for a walk in the park, taking an hour-long call, and then spending a couple hours editing her novel. Things go beautifully at first. Derek Jr. naps for nearly three hours in the morning, during which time I do a little writing myself. I feed and change her when she wakes up, but the effort of having someone else feed and clothe her seems like it’s already tuckered her out. Such is the life of a baby.

I put her right back down to sleep and try to nap in the room with her, but I can’t sleep. My brain is still whirring from the writing I did earlier. So I grab the monitor and take a crack at mixing a children’s song I’ve been working on. It’s the last thing I recorded before Derek Jr. was born. Fittingly, it’s called “I’m Sleepy.”

This nap is shorter. Because Derek Jr. has spent so much of the day in her dark bedroom, I bring her out into the sunshine in the living room when she wakes up. I hold her to my shoulder and we bounce around the room to my song, then to “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House.” She’s as cute 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 crayons are too thick for fine details, so in order to get five fingers you have to draw it way too wide, and it looks as if each hand has seven knuckles? That’s what Derek Jr.’s hands look like all the time.

My wife returns from her walk to find me winging Derek Jr. around the carpet like Fred Astaire, her hilarious cartoon hand in mine. My wife loves this song, too. She joins in. We’re all dancing. “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” is playing at my house and we’re all having a ball.

And then, all of a sudden, something is wrong.

Derek Jr. is upset, and none of our usual tricks makes her feel better for more than a minute or two. We figure she’s probably dealing with gas, but I’m well aware that “It’s probably gas” is what you say when you have no idea what’s actually wrong. We finally get her a little bit calmer and my wife steps into the bedroom for her call. I bring Derek Jr. into the living room to catch the start of the Rangers-Rockies game, but her discomfort starts up again as soon as Andrew McCutchen steps into the batter’s box for the first pitch. Something must really be wrong. I mean, who doesn’t love Andrew McCutchen?

I can’t get Derek Jr. to stop crying for more than a few moments at a time. Parenting books have a word for when you can’t get your baby to stop crying no matter what you do: Inconsolable. The more you read, the more that word terrifies you, and I now start to feel its four, consonant-laden syllables snaking up my spine. Something is wrong, and I cannot console Derek Jr. It is heartbreaking and frustrating and it makes me feel helpless.

Derek Jr. and I are now hiding in her room with the door closed so that the crying doesn’t ruin my wife’s call. I am bouncing her on a yoga ball and rocking her in the rocking chair. I am singing and dancing and letting her stare at the lamp as long as she wants because she loves lamp. None of it helps for long. The only thing I haven’t tried is feeding her, but it’s too early to feed her — we’ve found that she does a lot better if she waits three hours between meals — and besides, she hasn’t been exhibiting any of her usual signs of hunger.

As soon as we hit three hours, I grab the bottle anyway. It’s the only thing left to try, and it turns out to be the right thing. She is instantly soothed. She falls asleep after the first ounce; not something she normally does while drinking from a bottle. To my amazement, she steadily drinks the remainder while sound asleep. She wasn’t inconsolable after all. All she needed was the thing my instincts said to try first, and I feel both stupid for not trying it and cruel for letting her suffer.

When you’re getting ready to have a kid, you know going in that you are going to make mistakes. Every parent makes mistakes. You know this because other parents tell you so constantly. And then, completely unbidden, they start telling you horrifying stories of all the worst mistakes they made with their kids, and at the end of a story about, say, watching their kid crack their head open on the deck of the pool, they start laughing. You do your best to smile back like you think it’s funny too, even though you know in your heart that if you instead gave them a stern look for 45 seconds, those laughs would turn into sobs. Sorry, this paragraph got away from me. I know I will make much bigger mistakes than making my daughter wait half an hour for a bottle. But right now I feel like a monster.

Now that Derek Jr. is snoozing contentedly, I pull up the game again on my phone. We’re in the fourth inning, and things are nearly as ugly in Colorado as they have been in my apartment. Brandon Nimmo chops a ball between the first and second basemen, forcing pitcher Kyle Freeland to cover first base. The two players converge on first base in wildly divergent styles. Nimmo, hunched like a gremlin in his road grays, pounds effortfully down the baseline in the shambolic gallop that will, when he’s long retired, be the first thing that pops into our mind each time we hear his name. Freeland, in his crisp home whites, glides across the diamond and accepts the first baseman’s toss in stride. The two reach the bag at the same instant, and the gremlin isn’t giving way.

To avoid a collision, Freeland pushes off the bag and redirects himself up the baseline, which sends him toward a worse collision with first base umpire Alex MacKay. MacKay sees Freeland bearing down on him, but he needs to make the call on this bang-bang play, so instead of getting out of the way or ceding some ground, he hangs in there and plants his feet in preparation to absorb the contact. Freeland wraps MacKay in an embrace to keep from sending him tumbling into right field, but this act of mercy comes at the expense of self-preservation. His jaw crashes into MacKay’s shoulder as the umpire spreads his hands wide to call Nimmo safe.

And then the call gets overturned. MacKay was wrong. He jacked up Freeman’s jaw only to make an incorrect call. Although the Rockies get this out, the Rangers have the last laugh. Whether or not it’s because of the recent blow to the head, Freeland gives up a single to the next batter, a homer to the batter after that, and another homer to the third batter. The polite human pinball has gotten the worst of this interchange in just about every way. Leo Durocher must feel vindicated. I can’t help but wonder whether MacKay feels responsible.