Jay Biggerstaff-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.

June 5
It’s 3:00 PM, and I throw on yesterday’s highlights while giving Derek Jr. her third meal of the day. This is a bit of a luxury. She’ll soon be big enough to look around and see the TV while I’m feeding her. I should enjoy this opportunity while I can.

Two things stand out in the highlights. First, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Willson Contreras, and Ketel Marte all pulled home runs right down the line, but the three homers could not have been more different.

Contreras’s homer followed a classic archetype. Andrew Kittredge busted him with a fastball in on his hands, so Contreras got quick and short. He pulled his hands in and turned on the ball, launching it 402 feet and into the light standard atop the Green Monster. Marte’s homer looked familiar too, though we’re used to seeing it from left-handed batters, and he was batting righty. Tanner Scott attacked him with a fastball low and in, and Marte dropped his bat head on the ball, sent it over the bullpen, and finished with his hands up high for a walk-off homer. Crow-Armstrong followed a wilder path. He fell behind J.T. Ginn, 0-2, so Ginn tried to finish him off with a slider low and away. It wasn’t a terrible location, but Ginn no doubt hoped that it would get closer to the corner, probably even out of the zone away or low. Crow-Armstrong went out and got the ball, outside corner be damned, and hooked a low liner all the way over the right field fence. There was nothing textbook about it, but somehow the ball left the bat at 110 mph.

My takeaway is that there are a lot of ways to get the same thing done. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot anyway. My wife and I have our own very different ways of feeding, soothing, and putting Derek Jr. to sleep. We even hold her differently. We’ve read a million times that babies thrive on routine, especially when it comes to bedtime, but also, we’re different people whose brains and bodies work differently. I don’t really know how to square all of this.

It must be a while since I’ve watched Alex Vesia pitch, because his delivery is a total surprise to me. I call my dad over to the TV and ask him who Vesia looks like. “It’s a classic delivery,” he says, and when I suggest Sandy Koufax, he throws out Juan Marichal, too.

I figure I can’t be the first person to notice the Vesia-Koufax connection, especially as he plays for the Dodgers. It turns out old friend Eno Sarris (along with Chad Jennings and Dennis Lin) have written all about the way that the extreme rise on Vesia’s fastball is reminiscent of Koufax’s.

June 6
My wife has informed me that she has been deploying a new trick while she’s putting Derek Jr. down for the first nap of the day. If it seems like Derek Jr. needs a little bit of soothing in order to take that final step from tired to actually asleep, she’ll breastfeed her, just for a minute or two. It’s instantly soothing to Derek Jr., and once she’s in a place where my wife thinks she’s relaxed enough not to notice, my wife will ever-so-gently resettle her, unlatching her for just a moment.

But the resettling is subterfuge. When Derek Jr. is latched again, it’s on a pacifier, which my wife has, under cover of the baby’s groggy condition, sneaked into the line of fire at the perfect moment so smoothly that Derek Jr. is none the wiser. It’s a literal bait-and-switch. It’s also the exact move Indiana Jones pulls at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. My wife is very proud of herself, but I can see the bigger picture here. I inform my wife that if I end up getting run down and crushed by a giant boulder, it will be her fault. She seems fine with that, though she does start to refer to this bait-and-switch tactic as “Indiana Jones-ing” the baby.

June 7
The classic “I’m hungry” sign from a newborn is they start to bob their head. At a certain point, they’ll move from that to gnawing on their forearm. At this point Derek Jr.’s forearms are so chunky that she looks like she’s chomping down on a big turkey leg. Also, sometimes she ends up closer to the back of her hand, and it looks for all the world like she’s licking salt off of it before she takes a shot of tequila.

Derek Jr.’s smiling continues apace. She smiles all the time, but something special happened today. I put her down for her second nap of the day, and I followed my usual pattern. Rock her with a pacifier in until she falls asleep, stand up from the rocking chair, bring her over to the bed where the swaddle is laid out, deposit her on top, and swaddle her. She often wakes up during this process and is usually not too happy about it. So I gently swaddle her and calm her, and then pick her up and dance her around the room.

This time, though, when she woke up as I laid her on top of the swaddle, she started out looking displeased for a split-second, but just a split-second, because then she saw my face, and seeing my face caused her to break into a smile. It was the most heartwarming feeling. Just seeing my face makes her smile. That’s one of the most special gifts you can give a person, I’ve always thought. It’s something I really try to do with my wife. I want her to know that just seeing her makes me happy every time she walks into a room, whether it’s with a smile or a compliment or whatever it may be. I’m definitely not perfect at it, especially these days, when we’re often exhausted and at our wits’ end. But this is a good reminder.

June 7
Derek Jr. is doing this new thing where she keeps lifting her legs up in the crib while she’s napping. It’s obviously a sign of discomfort. I can’t get her to fall asleep for her four o’clock nap. She just keeps lifting her tiny legs over and over again, so I try something dumb, knowing full well that it will not work.

It does not work.

June 8
I’m dictating this a bit before three in the morning with Derek Jr. on my lap. She slept very well last night, and I started off my shift with something like four-and-a-half hours of uninterrupted sleep. I probably got another one or two later in the night, which made me feel the best I’ve felt in a long time. I really wanted my wife to have some time to work on her book, so at 5:00 AM, I dived straight into my article for the day. I pitched it to Meg Rowley the night before, but I didn’t hear back from her. It was Sunday night, and I normally try not to bother her with late-night pitches. Her job involves juggling so, so many things, and I would really like to be one of the easy parts of it. It’s not too big a deal anyway; my pitch was a pretty safe one. I felt confident that Meg would be on board, so I started writing and got my work done on the earlier side.

That bought time for me to look after Derek Jr. all afternoon so my wife could get some work done. When Derek Jr. went down for her early nap, I napped in the room with her. I guess I didn’t get as much sleep as I thought during the night, though. I actually slept longer than she did, which definitely had not happened before. When it was time for Derek Jr. to wake up, my wife sneaked in and grabbed her. Somehow I snoozed right through it. I must have slept for close to two hours.

For the last couple weeks, we’ve had Derek Jr. on a bit more of a schedule, and we think it’s really helping her. We feed her four times during the day, spacing her meals out every four hours as best we can. She seems to be taking to it really well, and it has so far allowed her to get 90-minute wake windows during the day and to sleep more or less all through the night. [Note from the achy-headed, bleary-eyed future: This sleeping-through-the-night business was short-lived indeed.] My wife got her own nap in the afternoon, during Derek Jr.’s second nap, and I turned on the TV hoping to catch an early game. Unfortunately, it was Monday, a travel day, so there weren’t any early games. Instead, I caught a few minutes of MLB Now while I hunted around the leaderboards for a topic to write about tomorrow.

I stumbled on Jose Siri’s home run robbery in Tampa last week, during which he seemed to save the ball from landing directly in a basket of chicken tenders, because for some reason, there’s a buffet pushed directly against the back of the left field wall at Tropicana Field. I considered pitching an article in which I’d break it down like the Zapruder film, trying to read the angles and determine whether the ball would’ve actually landed in the chicken tenders, but as it happened last week, I figured too much time has passed and too many people had written about it already. I’m late to the party, but at least the party has chicken tenders.

When MLB Now came back from commercial, Brian Kenny was talking about some comments that Manny Machado made over the weekend. Machado is slumping, and I guess he’s sick of hearing about all the different stats that don’t have anything nice to say about him, so he unleashed a bit of a rant: “I just wish we can get the analytics out of the way. I think there’s too many stats out there. Too many stats, way too many numbers. I don’t even know half of the stuff that goes up there. I look at the board sometimes, and I even ask some of the guys, like, ‘What is WCCVBB, whatever it is? What are these names that are being created?’ I mean, it’s just crazy to even keep up with.”

I considered pitching an article where I purported to answer Machado’s question, to explain what all those wonky acronyms stand for, except that all my acronyms are absurd. xwOBA, I’d explain, stands for Exact Weight of Batter’s Aura; it’s crazy what Statcast can measure these days. I decided against pitching this one. I’d be going for silliness, but I’m sure that Meg would correctly note that it might seem like I’m making fun of Machado, at a time when he’s struggling, no less.

Derek Jr. isn’t having a good night tonight. She was up early with a lot of gas trouble. Once that passed, she was rabidly hungry, so I got the emergency bottle from the fridge. She’s not in love with my normal burping technique tonight, so at one point I just sit her up on my lap and let her take her time burping. She takes that opportunity to gaze up lovingly at the dimmer lamp above us.

She does that all the time now. She’s reached that developmental stage where she loves nothing more than the ceiling fan and the lamp. As if to prove it, after a minute or two of mooning at the lamp, she lets out a big grin. That’s the joke around our house these days: She loves lamp. It’s a joke, of course, because of Steve Carrell’s unexpectedly soulful line reading in Anchorman, but watching her, I realize that she really does love lamp. She loves it. She is entranced. In her face, I can see why humans decided millennia ago that the sun, moon, and stars were gods.

Derek Jr. also spends a lot of time staring at her baby monitor. If she’s in her crib and she’s not sleeping, she’s staring at the camera. She doesn’t love it in the same way she loves lamp or the ceiling fan. It’s more of an object of fascination. It’s extremely high contrast, a carapace of white plastic surrounding the round black gimbal that houses the lens, so it’s the thing that draws her eye when she’s awake in the crib and all the lights are off in her room. The monitor has night vision. It’s basically a trail cam, except it’s not hidden at all, and instead of wildlife, we get to observe our daughter, who feels oddly like she’s observing us too. She never looks away. Her eyes are black saucers in the night vision. It feels like she never blinks, like she’s staring right into our souls.

Tonight, as Derek Jr. worships lamp, I remember Machado’s remarks. This time, I’m struck by something that happens toward the end of the clip. He bring up FIP, specifically in order to denigrate it. He says, “What even is that?” It’s a rhetorical question. But he’s surrounded by a circle of baseball reporters, and they can’t help themselves. Explaining the finer points of baseball is literally their entire job. It’s not a high paying job. It’s one you do because you absolutely love it. These reporters, multiple reporters, are unable to stop themselves from jumping in and telling Machado not only what FIP stands for, but how it works and why. Their explanation, of course, gives Machado another opportunity to bristle; he doesn’t like the idea that you’re trying to separate out an individual’s contribution when the team result is what matters. But I’m so heartened by these reporters. Even in the face of this angry superstar who wants nothing more than to vent, they still can’t help spreading the baseball gospel, bringing the light of knowledge to the darkest, grumpiest corners of the clubhouse. They are lamp.

I’ve been dictating this into my phone as I finished feeding Derek Jr., and she’s calmer now. If, somewhere in here, there’s a non sequitur where I say, “Good job, good job,” in the middle of a sentence, it’s because she let out a big burp and finally slumped into slumber there on my lap. I’m going to give her a couple more minutes of sleeping like this and then try to swaddle her and get her back into the crib. If it works, maybe I’ll be able to squeeze a couple more hours of sleep out of this shift and set us up for another good day tomorrow. Wish me luck.

June 9
We took Derek Jr. to the doctor today, and in the waiting room was another baby with the exact same name as her. Then another mom walked in with a four-year-old. The four-year-old had a different name, but after a minute, her mom tells us that they have a newborn at home who also has the same name as Derek Jr. We picked out the perfect special name, and it turns out that everyone in our neighborhood picked out the exact same perfect, special name.

If you’ve ever read Freakonomics, you know that this isn’t an accident. People want a nice name that feels a little bit special, so they pick an older name that they haven’t heard as much lately. But everyone else does the same thing, so the same names roar back at the same time. Then the name gets really popular, and people stop using it because it seems too trendy, and the cycle starts all over again. Still, my wife is a little bit crushed. The lesson is clear. We should’ve named her Derek Jr. for real. I doubt there are many of those in the waiting room.

Derek Jr. goes down to bed very easily tonight, and I get to watch Paul Skenes close out his night against the Dodgers. He left after six innings with the game tied at two. I switch over to the Orioles game. Only later do I learn that the bullpen lets the Dodgers score 10 runs in the seventh.

June 11
At 2:45 PM, my wife returns home to find me sitting on the couch shirtless, in tears, feeding Derek Jr. a bottle. I could explain the context to you, but I feel like that’s really all you need to know.

I did catch some of the Royals-Rangers game. It was wild and fun. I’d spent the whole morning writing about bunting, and then this game featured several fun bunts. With runners on the corners in the second inning, catcher Elias Díaz dropped a surprise bunt into the no-man’s land just next to the pitcher’s mound. Nobody even picked it up until he’d reached first base for an RBI single.

Evan Carter tried to bunt for a hit in the fourth inning, but just missed deadening it enough. Third baseman Nick Loftin charged it and made a fun running throw to nab him by a step. Personally, I think that’s about the most satisfying thing you can do on a baseball diamond: Charge the ball hard, time it up so you can scoop a perfect hop, sling it over from your glove to your throwing hand, fire it across your body on the run, watch it tail ever so slightly toward your arm side on the way to first, nail the runner just in time, then make a U-turn and jog back to your position like it was no big deal.

In the sixth, Ezequiel Duran tried to sacrifice a runner from second to third, but instead of getting in a good bunting position, he reached awkwardly for the ball, trying to stay in position to break for first and give himself a chance at beating the throw. As a result, he spun the ball off the end of the bat and right back to the pitcher, who nabbed the runner at third for a fielder’s choice.

June 12
Derek Jr.’s hips are just fine. That is the news of the day. She was a breech baby, and breech babies are at a higher risk of developing hip dysplasia, so at two or three months old, they need to get an ultrasound on their hips. Our doctor had told us not to worry; he can usually spot it and he didn’t see it in Derek Jr., but we still had to make the appointment just in case. We took Derek Jr. to the hospital, laid her on an adult-size examination table, and for once, my wife wasn’t the one getting gobs of ultrasound goo applied to her.

Although the sonogram technician had to press her legs into some odd angles for an extended period of time, Derek Jr. made it almost the entire way through without crying. In the end, I think the issue was that all the goop on her legs and belly absorbed into the butcher paper on the examination table and made her feel wet in a thousand places. We didn’t know exactly what the exam would look like, but we figured she’d probably come out of it upset, so we were prepared. My wife fed her in a secluded spot by the waiting room, and all was well. Anyway, Derek Jr.’s hips are just fine. She’s even up for some tummy time after we get home.

I mentioned that Derek Jr. was a breech baby. That came as a surprise, because for the first several months of the pregnancy, every time we went in for an ultrasound, the technicians made a big deal of how she was constantly flipping every which way. They love to see that. It’s a sign that the baby is doing well. But at a certain point, she just stopped changing positions. She stayed with her head tucked right beneath my wife’s ribs on the right side. Babies are often born looking a little smushed up, but because of the way she’d been pressed against my wife’s side, Derek Jr. was only smushed on one side. In the operating room, her right eye took a few minutes longer to open than her left. For the first couple weeks, it made her smile slightly, adorably crooked. It was a hard thing to capture in pictures, but we loved it, and being there for the sonogram brought back the memory of our little lopsided newborn.

June 14
The Knicks won the NBA championship last night. I’ve never been too much of an NBA fan. I grew up outside Washington D.C., so my home team was the Bullets, then the Wizards. The Bullards put together three winning seasons between the day I was born and the day I went off to college, and they were always a mess. It seemed like they were designed in a lab to repel potential fans, so we watched college basketball instead.

I’ve lived in New York for 19 years now, but my allegiance is still to my hometown. Even though I have no particular love for the Wizards, it’s hard to imagine ever identifying myself as a New York sports fan. It would feel like a betrayal. All the same, the city has been swept up in this magical Knicks run, and it’s been extraordinarily fun to watch. But I’ve been watching it from afar. We’re so busy and tired, and the finals take place so late in the night that I’ve only caught a couple quarters of the finals. We haven’t been out at a bar or a watch party to get swept up in the moment. We’ve only read about the crazy celebrations and seen them on social media. One day we’ll get to share with Derek Jr. how cool it is to live in a place like New York City, but right now, we can’t help feeling like we missed something.