Patrick Gorski-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.

April 25
Sometimes my daughter will be sleeping peacefully in my arms looking for all the world like God’s one perfect creation, and then she’ll crack her eyelids open for a moment, and during that moment, through the tiny crack, I can just barely make out her eyeballs rolling all the way back in her head like she’s possessed by a demon. It’s so disturbing. I swear it’s like I’m watching her soul being ripped from her body. When I mention this to my wife, she tells me that she finds the eye thing adorable.

Kyle Backhus closed out an 8-5, extra-inning win for the Phillies today. He didn’t get the save, though, because the score was 8-4 when he entered the game. Backhus is an extremely fun player and not just because of the name. He’s fun to watch. He’s a classic lefty sidearmer and he accentuates that by setting up angled toward first base, presumably to add some crossfire deception to his delivery. As you’d expect from a sidearmer, he’s a sinker-slider guy with an east-west movement profile and the occasional changeup. That sweeping slider looks great on TV, but unfortunately, it just doesn’t sweep eastward as much as you’d expect it to. It needs to end up in Philly, but it only makes it as far as Pittsburgh, a deficiency that’s likely the reason his ERA starts with a four instead of a three.

More importantly, Baseball Reference doesn’t list a single nickname for Backhus, which seems borderline impossible because, you see, his name is Kyle Backhus. Somebody whose brain is functioning at something approaching full capacity, please get on this. Kyle Backhus deserves a cool nickname.

April 26
Lest yesterday’s entry impart the mistaken impression that I’m unwilling or unable to generate a sobriquet, behold a list of nicknames by which I have addressed my daughter while changing her diaper:

• Big Dumper
• Little Dumper
• My Sweet Lady
• Mini Pooper
• Winnie Pooper
• Farty McCry
• Milky Cabrera
• Kody Funderburk
• Kody Thunderburp
• Why are you smiling like that
• Oh God please don’t not now
• No no no no
• Jesus it’s everywhere
• Well I guess it’s bathtime
• Dr. Pooper
• C. Trent Goes-in-Pants

April 27
Transcript of my wife changing Derek Jr.’s diaper:

“I can’t believe I have to do this.”

“Oh my God.”

“It’s not that bad… but it’s not that good.”

“The relief she feels.”

“My God, her legs are so fat.”

“Derek Jr., I’m so proud of you.”

“It wasn’t that big. It was just very… everywhere.”

“She’s thrilled right now. I’ve never seen her happier.”

April 29
It’s 3:30 PM and I just put Derek Jr. down for a nap and turned on the Twins-Mariners game. Royce Lewis is up for the Twins in the bottom of the seventh, and Byron Buxton has edged so far away from the on-deck circle to get a better look at pitcher Eduard Bazardo that he’s very nearly directly behind home plate. No one seems to notice, but he’s apparently been doing this all game long. During the fourth inning, Buxton was practicing his snow shoveling back there.

I guess that’s what happens when you spend your whole career in Minnesota. It doesn’t help Buxton all that much. He grounds into a fielder’s choice and the Mariners pull Bazardo.

We just got back from the one month pediatrician visit. It was smooth sailing, and the percentile charts confirm what we’d been feeling: Derek Jr. is growing like crazy. “The only thing I want to ask,” says the pediatrician, “is whether she’s starting making eye contact with you.” The question catches me off guard. It’s true. Just in the last couple days, she’d started looking me right in the eye while I fed her. I’d registered it, but I’m so focused on just surviving right that I hadn’t stopped to think about the fact that this was an entirely new development. Our baby now looks right into our eyes. It’s nuts that I didn’t think about this before the doctor asked. I am literally writing a journal about all of the things I notice about this baby! Turns out she’s right on schedule. She gets a clean bill of health, and we’re informed that she’s now allowed to sleep uninterrupted for up to seven hours if she can manage it. What a world that would be.

April 30
April is almost over and things are getting real. In the baseball world that means consequences for managers. Alex Cora and Rob Thomson just lost their jobs after ugly starts. Carlos Mendoza must be waking up in a cold sweat a couple times a night. Things are getting real in our house, too, and that means a few things. First, it means that we’re getting to understand Derek Jr. better. We’re better at knowing how and how much to feed her, which turns into better sleep and a happier baby. It seems like so much of my job right now is picking up on cues, reading her face and her sounds and her body language. We’re figuring out what bothers her — bright lights, how hard the changing pad is against the back of her head, laying supine too soon after eating, it’s a long list — and what soothes her.

Things are also getting real in the sense that Derek Jr. is growing. Rapidly. All of a sudden, her newborn clothes no longer fit. And when I say all of a sudden, I mean that it literally happened two days ago. Three days ago they fit; yesterday they didn’t. She’s now onto the next size up. The past two mornings, we went through her clothes, holding up onesie after onesie — some of which she wore only a few days ago! — and laughing at how absurd it would be to try to squeeze her into them now. Some clothes she never even had time to wear once. Sadly, we have no unworn baby shoes to give away, because — and if you should run into Ernest Hemingway, please tell him this — babies aren’t supposed to wear shoes, buddy. Shoes can hinder the development of their feet. Your six-word story is structurally flawed, Mr. Nobel Laureate. On the bright side, it does mean that Derek Jr. is now big enough to wear this killer onesie that David Appelman sent.

Derek Jr. is already so different from the baby we met at the hospital, and she will never be that baby again. When she was first born, she was such a monkey. She hooted and clung to my wife with her long, spindly limbs. Now she’s a little bowling ball, and I’m sure she’ll be something else soon enough. In the afternoon, I settle her down for a nap. We’re old pros at this now. It goes like clockwork, except the larger onesie we put on her isn’t very flexible, so it makes her upset when it goes over her head. We probably won’t use this one again. Another lesson learned: Stretchy clothes make everybody’s life easier.

I turn on the Twins-Mariners game, but I struggle to get into it. Two years ago, an absurd series of events led me to fall in love with the Twins. I wrote an article about Edouard Julian and recorded a song to go with it. The song found its way into the locker room, and so did I. I met players and coaches, played the song while sitting next to Julien, got a sincerely moving embrace from Twins fans, and learned about the unbelievably fantastic Minnesota State Fair. (Seriously, everybody out there, you have to go to the Minnesota State Fair. It’s the best.) It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and I knew that it would make me a Twins fan for life. But after last summer’s fire sale, nearly everybody I interacted with, from the GM to the coaches to the players, has moved elsewhere. I still love the Twins, but it’s different. They’re no longer the team I fell in love with, and it happened so fast.

While we’re likening the Twins to my daughter, I should mention that actually I lobbied to name her the opposite of Twins. I was mostly joking, but I wanted to name her Singleton, which is a word I learned from the form we had to fill out before each sonogram. You had to check the box next to either Singleton, Twins, or Triplets. It’s such a delightful word. I love the way it scans. Every time we went to the imaging place, I’d make my pitch for Singleton, and every time, my wife would confirm that her preference for a normal, human name still held sway. Then I’d use the coffee machine in the waiting room to make a decaf coffee, which is the thing I miss most about working in an office by far. I don’t need the coffee, even. I just like to hear the machine kachunk its way through the process. Without fail, the sonogram technician would call my wife’s name the moment I pressed brew, so I’d end up scurrying down the hall trying to catch up with them without moving so fast that I sloshed hot almost coffee down my wrist.

Then we’d get a peek at Derek Jr., tensing every muscle in our bodies at the beginning, then unclenching in stairstep fashion as the technician informed us, one anatomical feature at a time, that everything looked fine. It was worth the apprehension, of course, because we got to see the baby. My wife called the sonograms FaceTiming the baby. They print out pictures for you, too, and not just one like you see in the movies, but lots of pictures at every sonogram. Whole body pictures, pictures of her adorable little feet, and even ghoulish pictures of the beginnings of her face. Our refrigerator is still covered in them. God, we loved that blurry baby-esque phantasm. At some point, we’ll have to move those printouts over to a memory box and start covering the fridge in pictures where she doesn’t look like a poltergeist. But not yet.