Michael McLoone-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 23
Today marks my first time leaving the house for more than an hour or two since Derek Jr. was born. I’ve got band practice, and then the band is going out to a bar to watch the game. I don’t tell anyone, but I’m so out of the loop these days that I have no idea what game everyone is talking about. The timing couldn’t be worse, and that turns out to be the theme of the evening.

I feed Derek Jr. and put her down for a nap right before I head out, but she wakes up with horrible stomach trouble as soon as I leave. Band practice is two hours long, and my wife spends the entire time soothing Derek Jr. Band practice is a delight, as always. It’s extraordinarily loose. I haven’t touched a guitar in months, but nobody else has been practicing either, and it’s not like we need to be ready for a show or anything, so nobody minds much when a song goes off the rails.

In the middle of practice, my wife sends me a text. A new kitchen cabinet has been delivered downstairs. It’s a very large piece of furniture, meant to hold our trash can and two recycling bins in order to create more counter space. We ordered it all the way back in December, when we were frantically jettisoning our possessions and trying to find ways to make enough space to raise a child in a New York City apartment. The cabinet is months late, so late that we weren’t sure that it was going to come at all, but here it is, arriving at the first moment that I’m not around to carry it up the stairs. It’s in three enormous pieces that are blocking the vestibule so our neighbors can’t get in or out of the building.

Without any hesitation, the band volunteers to come help me carry everything upstairs when practice is over. With four people pitching in, what would have taken me an hour of panting, sweating, scrapes, and bruises instead takes two minutes. I am honestly overwhelmed with gratitude. I make a mental note to buy a round at the bar. When everything is upstairs, I check in on my wife. She is in Derek Jr.’s bedroom with the lights off, feeding her in the dark, clearly struggling. She hasn’t been able to put her down since I left. I tell the band I’ll meet them at the bar, and I stick around for a bit to help out.

When I get to the bar, I learn that the game is not even a baseball game. We’re there to watch the Knicks in the Eastern Conference Finals. But the game doesn’t start for a while, so we ask the bartender to switch over to the Brewers-Dodgers game. It’s the one bartender who likes me. I rarely drink, and when I do, I’m not chatty enough to leave an impression on bartenders, but this is the one bartender in the whole city who likes me (or knows me, for that matter) because I came into the bar last year wearing a Kenyon College sweatshirt, and her son also went to Kenyon.

Unfortunately, the one bartender who likes me has atrocious taste in music. Every time she’s been working when I’ve come in, the bar has been awash in mopey, down-tempo soft rock that’s completely unsuited to the atmosphere of a sports bar. We all met up there for dinner on my birthday, but we ended up leaving after one drink and getting dinner somewhere else because the music was so depressing. She must have a Spotify playlist titled “Music for When Your Pet Has a Chronic Illness.”

Still, it’s nice to have a bartender who likes you, and she happily puts on the ballgame. Robert Gasser is pitching, and my friend Dan poses the most important question of the night. He points out the score bug, where Gasser’s name sits atop the name of whichever batter is up at the moment. Which batter’s name, Dan asks, would best pair with Gasser’s? The rest of us remark on what a great question it is, but nobody comes up with a good answer. We are drained from two hours of sloppy punk rock and furniture moving. I duck out at halftime to help out my wife, because Derek Jr. is still struggling. I realize on my way out that I never remembered to buy everyone a round. I feel like a jerk.

Derek Jr. goes to sleep not long after nine, then wakes up a bit before three in the morning. Around five, I pull up the Batting WAR leaderboard, set the plate appearance threshold to one, and scroll through every hitter in baseball. The answer is Mickey Gasper. The best pairing is Gasser-Gasper.

May 24
It’s around 5 p.m., and I’m feeding Derek Jr. a bottle before bath time. We manage to catch the last out of the Twins-Red Sox game. It’s been an eventful inning. Before we turned it on, Isiah Kiner-Falefa hit what looked like it would be a walk off home run. It’s gloomy in the Northeast, rainy up in Boston and here in New York. The Red Sox were down, 6-4, with one out in the ninth and runners on the corners. Kiner-Falefa overestimated his own strength. He strutted toward first base holding the bat in front of him with both hands, clearly thinking about how exactly he was going to flip it when the ball landed in the seats. The fly ball that he was sure would soar over the Green Monster for a walk-off homer instead bounced off it.

Connor Wong, who started the play on first base, seemed to be fooled as well, but in the other direction. Wong jogged cautiously to second base and stayed there until the ball hit the wall, as if he thought it might get caught. He didn’t start running in earnest until he heard the ball clang off the Monster, and the delay cost him and the Red Sox everything. A great relay throw nailed him at home plate. He probably just didn’t get a good read on the ball, which is understandable on such a miserable, rainy day, but he should have scored the tying run easily. The Red Sox are still down, 6-5, with two outs of the ninth. That’s when Derek Jr. and I turn on the game.

Boston is challenging the play at the plate, and the grounds crew has taken the opportunity to make some emergency repairs to the sloppy pitcher’s mound and home plate area. They dump several shovels of soil conditioner on each and race around in circles to spread it out with rake. The challenge fails. The Twins are one out from victory.

Also, Derek Jr. has fully fallen asleep on the bottle. She’s still eating, but slowly. I’m not sure whether I should wake her up to keep her eating. I don’t think she’s been getting quite as much sleep as she needs lately, but we’re not supposed to let her sleep too much in our arms because we are trying to teach her good sleep hygiene. Ideally, a baby learns to put themself to sleep so that they don’t need you to put them back to sleep every time they wake up in the crib. But they’re also your baby, and it’s hard not to let them sleep in your arms. It’s hard to let them cry in the crib without scooping them up and solving whatever their problem might be. We’re the managers in this situation, and we have a very quick hook. Sometime soon we’ll have to make decisions about whether and how to sleep train Derek Jr., and that will mean developing some thicker skin and, to overtax the metaphor, letting her try to pitch her way out of trouble.

We know people who have tried all sorts of different methods for helping their kids learn to sleep through the night, and we’re not sure what’s best. That’s an ongoing discussion, though. Right now, we’re in a pickle. Part of the reason Derek Jr. fell asleep on the bottle is that she did the same thing earlier in the day, which meant she didn’t get enough to eat, so her hunger woke her up from her previous nap too early. Knowing that, I throw her over my shoulder and give her a burp to wake her up so she’ll keep eating.

Yoendrys Gómez is pitching to Jarren Duran. If the Twins still had Jhoan Duran on their roster, he’d probably be pitching right now and the matchup would be Duran-Duran. That’s one more thing last year’s fire sale has stolen from us. Despite the work of the groundskeepers, Gómez’s back foot slips on the freshly-repaired mound as he starts his delivery. It’s a balk, and it moves Kiner-Falefa over from second to third. If he had been running out of the box earlier, his double would have been a triple, and he would have just scored the game-tying run.

Gómez manages to throw the next pitch, but he loses control of it and hits Duran. Duran understandably stood in there and let the ball clip him in the foot so that he could get on base. Normally, that’s the smart play, but in this situation, if he had hopped out of the way, it probably would’ve turned into a wild pitch and scored Kiner-Falefa from third. Now there are runners on first and third and Derek Shelton has seen enough. He pulls Gómez in favor of Travis Adams, who looks like he’s been using the same worn glove since he was Little Leaguer.

If Adams can record the final out, he’ll earn the first save of his career. He’ll also be the 11th Twin to record a save this season. It only takes him one pitch to do so. Ceddanne Rafaela, who never saw a pitch he didn’t like, is at the plate, and Adams clearly knows the scouting report. He throws a cutter that starts on the outside corner and ends up about three inches off it. Rafaela goes with the pitch, but hits it off the end of the bat, sending a liner into right field. Every ball is an adventure on this murky, misty day, but Austin Martin manages to glove the weak line drive. The Twins have swept the Red Sox in Boston for the first time since 1994.

Once again, Derek Jr. has fallen asleep on the bottle, and I have to give her a burp to wake her up enough that she’ll keep eating. I’m still not sure it’s the right move. I have a stack of parenting books and I’ve read some already, but they all offer differing advice. It’s very, very easy to second-guess everything you do. The other part of the calculus right now is that my wife is taking a nap. She’s desperately sleep deprived. I’m supposed to wake her up when Derek Jr. finishes the bottle and is ready for her bath, so I’m tempted to let Derek Jr. sleep longer so that the feeding takes longer and my wife gets more sleep.

And, of course, Derek Jr. wakes up when she takes a big

[Note from the future: The entry above cut off mid-sentence, just like that. I don’t remember why. It was two months ago. I’m going to leave it that way because it feels like maybe the truest thing in this whole journal. After that, I wrote the words “That night, Derek Jrz.” (sic), and once again left them cut off with no indication of where the sentence was going. Then I described a dream about bees.]

That night, Derek Jrz.

Bee Dream
I hardly ever remember my dreams. Almost never. I suspect it has something to do with how terrible my sleep is. I think I might actually have some sort of medical sleep disorder. The hospital in my neighborhood has a sleep clinic, so I waited months for an appointment, but it turned out that the only thing they test for is sleep apnea and I don’t have sleep apnea. Anyway, tonight I had this dream and I remembered it.

Another dream ended, one that I can’t quite remember, but it was scary and I was trying to escape from a giant mall. My life was in danger and I had to escape. I made it out, but the exit turned out to be this vast covered courtyard that opened into a huge garden with flowers and bushes and trees arrayed around a grassy nucleus. As I’m leaving, I see my friend Roger sitting with someone else. I recognize the other person, maybe they’re a famous actor or something, but I don’t really know if they’re anybody specific in the dream. Regardless, the two of them are, though not speaking, in some kind of intense situation. There’s some sort of argument taking place, but they don’t want to continue it in front of me. I say hi to Roger, but he doesn’t acknowledge me. It’s all very odd. Roger would never do that. Then I see a bee. And then I do something really stupid.

I’m very suggestible during my dreams. I’ll see an old, dusty box in a room and think, “Gee, I hope this box doesn’t have any spiders in it.” And my brain will hear that thought and go, “Did somebody say SPIDERS? Hundreds of thousands of giant spiders POURING OUT OF THE BOX AND DEVOURING YOUR—” and then I’ll wake up with a start, suddenly so full of adrenaline and cortisol that I won’t be able to get back to sleep for another two hours, but more importantly, feeling like a complete idiot. If I’d never had that first thought about spiders, then my brain wouldn’t have gotten the chance to “Yes, and” it into a thousand-legged night terror, and I’d still be sleeping.

So in this dream, I see a bee, surely buzzing among the many flowering bushes in this lush garden. And then I worry that maybe there are more bees, so of course, more bees appear. I worry that they’re going to swarm me and sting me, so they swarm me and sting me. But in an unusual twist, I don’t wake up right away. I think it’s because Roger is there, and his presence makes me less terrified, because maybe he can help me. I shout to him, “These bees are stinging me!” But he still ignores me. He’s sitting on a low concrete wall on the edge of the courtyard next to this mystery person, and he won’t look up. He’s just staring intently into the grass. I keep shouting that same thing, “These bees are stinging me!”, over and over again. He never even acknowledges me.