Kyle Ross-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 17
Yesterday, when Derek Jr. was fussy, my wife played a Black Eyes Peas song on her phone and bounced our daughter on a yoga ball. Today it became clear that she considered this to be a successful experiment and that it will be a thing in our household going forward. The baby is fussy. Let’s bounce her to that Black Eyed Peas song. On repeat. Day after day. The Black Eyed Peas playing in our home. This was not a path I could have foreseen. This is not a path I would have chosen. This already seems like it will not be a path I can escape.

While I’m feeding Derek Jr. in the evening, I catch the ninth and 10th innings of the Cubs and White Sox. The 10th inning is one of the most exciting I’ve seen in a while. The Cubs start with Pete Crow-Armstrong as the zombie runner, which already makes it must-see TV. The White Sox broadcast is apparently having some sort of kids’ day celebration, and all of the graphics have a distinctly Backyard Baseball feel to them. If you’ve never played the Backyard Sports games, then this will go right over your head, but as I watch, a realization washes over me: The speedy, lanky, left-handed, red-haired Pete-Crow Armstrong is Major League Baseball’s version of the speedy, lanky, left-handed, red-haired Pete Wheeler. I mean, come on:

Jamie Sabau-Imagn Images

As if on cue, PCA steals third base on the fourth pitch. It’s a classic Pete Wheeler move. Then things get scarier for the White Sox. Tyler Davis walks Dansby Swanson, putting runners on first and third with no outs. The infield is in, but Crow-Armstrong will be a tough man to catch at the plate on anything but a perfectly placed grounder. The cameras zoom in on Davis just in time to watch him mutter some curse words. I can’t quite make out what he’s saying, aside from the last word, which is very clearly a compound word one avoids in polite company. But my sense is that Davis isn’t so much castigating himself as he is opining about something specific. Maybe it’s something in his performance, maybe it’s about Swanson or the umpire. I’m open to any theories.

Nico Hoerner, the exact kind of contact hitter the White Sox don’t want to face, is up next. But everything works out, momentarily. Hoerner chops a ball directly to the shortstop, and Crow-Armstrong is hopelessly hung up between third and home. Still he does what he can. He keeps the rundown going long enough for the runners to move up to second and third, so the White Sox aren’t out of the woods yet. They bring the infield in again, but then they decide to walk Michael Busch intentionally. It loads the bases and brings up a struggling Alex Bregman with the possibility of an inning-ending double play.

The Sox move back to double-play depth, and Bregman does indeed ground the ball to shortstop, but he hits it so softly that Colson Montgomery’s only play is to first. The run scores. The Cubs now have an 8-7 lead and two runners in scoring position with two outs. The White Sox again choose to intentionally walk the bases loaded, and I can’t help but feel for Davis, whose walk rate is skyrocketing through not much fault of his own.

Davis buckles down, and then he buckles down again. He strikes out Seiya Suzuki looking with a fastball on the outside corner, but Suzuki challenges the pitch, which turns out to be just off the outside corner. Davis goes right back to the well, shaking off his catcher a couple times because he wants to challenging Suzuki with another outside fastball. Suzuki swings through this one, and the side is retired. The Cubs have scored one run on one walk, no hits. The ball never left the infield. Davis is credited with three walks. Little does he know that he is about to earn the second win of his major league career.

The White Sox start the bottom of the 10th with Chase Meidroth on second. He’s no Pete Wheeler, but he doesn’t have to be. Andrew Benintendi squares and bunts the first pitch he sees right to the center of the triangle composed of the pitcher, the first baseman, and the second baseman. I suppose when the ball ends up right in the middle of three people rather than two, it’s no longer a tweener; it’s an amonger. Busch plays it perfectly. He takes charge, fields the ball cleanly, and turns to toss it to first base, but pitcher Ryan Rolison forgets to cover the bag, and although second baseman Hoerner sprints over, catches Busch’s toss in stride, and hits the bag so hard that he partially rolls his ankle, he starts from so deep that he just can’t get there before Benintendi. Now the White Sox are the team with runners on first and third with no outs, only they’re not. A replay shows that Hoerner did beat Benintendi to the bag, then it shows exactly how far his ankle turned inward before he leaps up into the air in order to get his weight off it as quickly as possible. It’s incredible that Hoerner made it there in time. As the play was developing, it looked like he had no chance.

Still, the White Sox have the tying run on third and one out. It was a lot of action for one pitch. The next pitch contains a lot of action, too. Rolison starts Edgar Quero with another fastball right over the heart of the plate, and Quero does exactly what you’re supposed to do with such a pitch. It lands in the first row of the bleachers in left center. Everybody in the vicinity leaps to their feet to try to grab it – everybody except for the two Cubs fans between whom the ball lands.

Davis earns the win by inducing two grounders, striking out a batter, and walking three, two intentionally. Rolison throws two fastballs in the zone and earns the loss. As Quero crosses home plate in a Gatorade storm, the camera cuts to the stands, where, as if waiting for his cue, a White Sox fan with a glorious moustache in an Aaron Rowand jersey – that’s right, an Aaron Rowand jersey – jumps up and down in jubilation, then remembers his manners, turns to his Cubs fan neighbor, and offers him a gracious handshake.

May 18
There aren’t any day games today, so I catch up on yesterday’s highlights while Derek Jr. is down for an afternoon nap. The very first highlight I see is Junior Caminero’s 12th home run of the year. It’s nuts. Eury Pérez throws him a 2-2 sweeper down and away. And when I say down and away, I mean smack on the bottom edge of the zone, and just an inch or two from the outside corner. It’s a bit of a cement mixer, and it was likely intended to end up a few inches off the corner, but it’s still a fantastic location. Caminero doesn’t mind. He’s way out in front of the pitch, so to slow down, he sells out his lower half completely. With all his weight already on his front leg, he sticks his butt out, bends over at the waist, and reaches out to hook the ball toward the corner. By all rights, this should be a flare into shallow left, but Caminero’s swing is so powerful that even this hamstrung version of it carries enough bat speed to send the ball an absurd 372 feet and into the bleachers.

It immediately makes me think of Kirk Gibson’s homer in the 1988 World Series. The difference there is that Gibson was sitting on a backdoor slider the whole way. The day before, scout Mel Didier had guaranteed that Dennis Eckersley would throw one in such a situation: “When we got to Eckersley, and it was my turn to speak, I used my best Southern drawl and said, ‘Pardners, you can bank on this as sure as I’m standing here. If you’re a left-handed hitter and you get in a tough, tough situation with Eckersley, he’s going to throw you that back-door slider.’” Everyone on the bench was whispering “backdoor slider.” Gibson was so sure of what he was going to get that he stepped directly toward the plate in order to put himself in position to handle that outside pitch. Caminero, on the other hand, pretty clearly gets fooled, and crucially, this slider is breaking away from him rather than toward him. But he’s strong and coordinated enough to send the ball into the stands anyway.

Amazingly, this wasn’t the farthest low-outside pulled homer of the season. On April 10, Javier Báez — who else? — reached out and turned on a Chris Paddack sweeper that was off the plate both low and outside. Since 2008, the indiscriminate Báez is one of just four righties to pull multiple home runs on pitches in Attack Zone 19 (the low-and-outside corner, in the shadow zone). As I’m writing this, I am realizing that maybe after seven weeks of paternity leave, I am suffering from baseball analysis withdrawal.