Benny Sieu-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 first installment of that series. The introduction can be found here.

April 13
It’s somewhere around 9:30 PM and Derek Jr. is asleep. I am, briefly, watching baseball for the first time since she was born two weeks ago. The Mets and Dodgers are in the eighth inning. The main thing I notice is Joey Gerber’s delivery. I’ve never heard of Gerber before, but my daughter is wearing a Gerber brand onesie, and I sincerely hope he’s the heir to that particular fortune. His leg kick is a joy to behold:

It would be a grave understatement to say that Gerber has a high-energy delivery. Brendan Gawlowski called him funky. Eric Longenhagen said he had an “odd, chicken wing arm action.” I’m inclined to go with Ricky Conti, who called the delivery “violent, with tons of effort and recoil.” When you think of a pitcher’s leg kick, you think of, say, Justin Verlander smoothly raising his knee up toward his chest, his lower leg pointed straight down toward the rubber. Even Juan Marichal’s legendary leg kick started roughly the same way. He raised his knee, and at first, his lower leg merely came along for the ride. What made the leg kick famous was that Marichal’s foot just kept on rising long past the point where other pitchers’ stopped. He reared way back, intimidating the batter with the bottom of his spikes, and catapulted down the mound, the ultimate tall-and-fall delivery.

Gerber is nothing like that. His leg kick is quick and violent. The lower leg isn’t merely along for the ride. He swings his whole leg straight up like a punter until his foot is at neck height. It’s like he doesn’t even have a knee joint; the torque on his hip must be ferocious. But he doesn’t use that leg kick to rear back and fall down at the batter like Marichal or Satchel Paige. Out of nowhere, lightning quick, Gerber does bend his leg after all, so that he can tuck his knee into his chest. He lowers his knee, and even more unexpectedly, tucks his whole torso too, turning this big wild leg kick into a compact drop-and-drive delivery. Then comes the chicken wing arm action, a mid-90s fastball, and a follow-through just as herky-jerky as the preamble. It’s like Gerber Frankensteined together three completely different deliveries and figured that if he raced through the whole thing fast enough, nobody would notice the crooked seams:

Gerber allows two hits and a walk over two innings of work, but he also strikes out five and holds the Dodgers scoreless. I don’t know any of this yet. I only catch a batter or two, enough to marvel at the delivery, before Derek Jr. wakes up with a wet diaper. She needs four more diaper changes over the next two hours. Somewhere in there, Joey Gerber develops a blister and hits the IL.

April 14
Games go fast these days. I have always gone to bed on the earlier side, which used to mean I’d miss a lot of West Coast games and the endings of a most East Coast games. The pitch clock has allowed me to actually watch a lot more whole games.

Everything’s different now. My wife and I split up the nights. I take the early shift with Derek Jr., watching her from 10 PM until three or four in the morning, (hopefully) sleeping when she (hopefully) sleeps, which means we can watch late games together (which is to say that I can have the game playing on my phone at a low volume somewhere out of her line of sight) as I wind her down for a last feed and several last diaper changes. With the Mets in L.A., we are in for a treat: Nolan McLean vs. Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

I am excited. I get the computer set up early. We witness a couple of those reality-bending McLean breaking balls. We catch Francisco Lindor ambushing Yamamoto with a first-pitch homer to lead off the game. As my wife says goodnight, I watch noted hot dog critic Steve Gelbs deliver a deliciously scathing review of the Dodger Dog. And then, miracle of miracles, Derek Jr. actually seems to tire out. At a normal human bedtime. It only took two diaper changes and a whopping four ounces of milk, but she is sleepy by 11. I gently set her down in the crib, and though I have a bunch more chores to do, I am so tired myself that I figure I’ll just lay down with the game and the baby monitor for a minute and recover.

McLean and Yamamoto really did have themselves a pitcher’s duel, combining for 15 strikeouts and just two earned runs over 14 2/3 innings. But I only learn that later. I pass out the instant my head hits the pillow and wake up to the sound of the postgame show some 90 minutes later. The pitch clock is great, but now I wouldn’t mind if the games went back to stretching on forever.

April 15
The main thing I do on the early shift is watch Derek Jr. from right up close. Obviously, I go into each night hoping we’ll both get to spend most of the time sleeping, but when we’re not, I’m sitting in the rocking chair and feeding her, or sitting in the rocking chair and holding her upright while she digests, or walking around the room rocking her. For a couple hours every night, my head is craned down to stare right into her face from 10 inches away. It’s starting to give me tension headaches, but it’s so special. This is what I’m going to remember from the first weeks and months of fatherhood, and I imagine it will be the setting for most of the entries that follow. Derek Jr. is still so, so tiny, and her eyes don’t even focus yet, but they’re so bright. She’s the sweetest thing, and while I look at her, I have a lot of time to think about what I’ll do with her:

That’s how I phrase it in my head: “What will I do with you?” I’ve been singing her “Pink and Blue” by the Mountain Goats, all the time. It was the first song I sang to her at the hospital, and I know I’m almost certainly imagining it — she’s months away from the time when babies actually start to recognize music — but I feel like something about it relaxes her. Anyway, that’s the chorus: “And what will I do with you / Pink and blue, true gold, nine days old.” So that’s what I think: “What will I do with you?” And the answer comes in the form of a quote from poet Richard Hugo that’s always stuck with me:

It may have been the most important lesson I ever learned, maybe the most important lesson one can teach. You are someone and you have a right to your life. Too simple? Already covered by the Constitution? Try to find someone who teaches it. Try to find a student who knows it so well he or she doesn’t need it confirmed.

Derek Jr. is a newborn, so right now our job is just to keep her as happy and healthy as possible. We want to raise her to be a good, kind person, and we’re aware that in the future we’ll have to try very hard not to spoil her rotten. But I spend a lot of time thinking about the foundation, making sure she starts out knowing that she is safe and supported and loved, that she is someone and that’s enough. There in the rocking chair with the lamp turned all the way down, I look down at this creature who has never hurt a soul and my addled brain starts to get irrationally angry about the concept of Limbo, about parents who cut their trans children out of their lives, about all the big and small ways my wife and I and everybody out there was made to feel like their worth was conditional. Whoever this kid grows up to be, she’s going to know without a doubt that she’s loved, and that everyone deserves to feel that way. And if she turns out to be a serial killer or a Yankee fan, well, we’ll just have to figure that out.

Here’s why you got that sermon tonight of all nights. Derek Jr. wakes up at half past midnight, and we spend an hour and a half working through a couple of diapers and bottles in the company of the Blue Jays and the Brewers. The Blue Jays kick the scoring off with some small ball.

With one out in the first, Daulton Varsho walks, advances to third on a single, and scores on a sacrifice fly. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. raps the single that pushes him to third, and it’s a thing of beauty. With the first baseman holding Varsho on and the second baseman in double play position, the right side of the infield is wide open. Guerrero goes with a sinker low and out over the plate, effortlessly bouncing it across the turf and into right field:

That’s it. It’s just a single. But it’s also a great example of what makes Guerrero a special player, even if he never becomes the kind of special that we want him to be. For all our sabermetric handwringing about his launch angle, this is one of the benefits of his flat, balanced swing. He’s capable of hitting anything, and he’s capable of hitting it anywhere. You’d never guess this because it only travels 11 feet in the air, not even far enough to reach the infield grass, but it’s the hardest-hit ball of the entire game.

I don’t ever want to lose the ability to appreciate a swing like that. It makes me wonder whether we’re asking all the wrong questions. For all his light tower power, maybe this is simply what Guerrero is supposed to be as a hitter — “tall Luis Arraez,” as Joe Sheehan will refer to him. Sure, he’s succeeded as a power hitter from time to time and he’ll do so again, but if we’re talking about the craft of hitting, about artistry, maybe he’s just a contact hitter whose power keeps pushing him into the wrong conversation. If I were a part of the Blue Jays organization, I’d be focused on optimizing those gifts. Since I’m not, I should make sure I appreciate them for what they are. Tall (and way more powerful) Luis Arraez is an improbable and outrageously fun thing to get to witness.

In sillier news, Dylan Cease seems to arrive to spring training every season with a new look. Generally, that new look involves a bit more facial hair than the previous year’s, but he’s reached a new level. This year, the look leaves you no choice but to assume that Cease found a picture of Doug Drabek somewhere and cried, “That’s the one!” Dylan Cease is Drabecking: