Nathan Ray Seebeck-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 1
During the undocumented morass of the first two weeks of Derek Jr.’s life, my computer died. Allow me rephrase that: We murdered my computer. At some point one delirious night, I sat on the ottoman in our living room only to jump up in shock with sodden, clingy pants. The ottoman was sopping wet. We never figured out how it got that way. That’s a decent metaphor for the experience of having a brand new baby. A piece of furniture was totally soaked – I mean 100% saturated; it must have contained half a gallon of water – and we literally had no idea how it got that way. We still don’t. Later that night, my computer wouldn’t turn on, and I put two and two together. It must have been sitting on the ottoman at some point. It must be dead now. The Apple store confirmed it. The computer was dead. Cause of death: Drowning.

It was lucky that the computer died at a time when I didn’t have to work, but it was still a catastrophic situation. The technician at the store was not at all sanguine about my chances of recovering the contents of the computer, and one of the many things that I had neglected in the frenzy of getting ready for a baby was backing up my hard drive. I had just offloaded onto that hard drive roughly 90% of the pictures from my camera roll in order to make room for baby pictures. I’d be losing a million health insurance forms from the pregnancy and God knows how many other important documents. The one that hurt the most, though, is that I had dozens and dozens of songs in various stages of completion. I have been working on a bunch of records at once, and I have a ton of older, unreleased songs and projects sitting around and waiting for the right situation. It was painful to even think about the sheer tonnage of lyrics, chords, artwork, voice memos, demos, and fully-recorded songs trapped on my pickled computer.

It took three weeks and three different computer shops, but I found out yesterday that the data has been recovered! It’s saved! Are there any baseball songs among the masses that just found salvation? Why don’t you ask this demo that I recorded in 2016 and which I was probably saving for a compilation of outtakes:

I head in to Manhattan to pick up an external hard drive containing my recovered data. The technician at the store is watching the Yankees pregame show on his computer. We chat about the AL East as he waits for someone from the backroom to bring out the hard drive. The Yankees are looking unbeatable in a division that’s looking much worse than expected, and Ben Rice and Cam Schlittler look like they’re going to be pinstripe-clad stars for a long time. But the party’s almost over. The owner of the shop walks out of the backroom instead. He tries to keep it under wraps because there’s a customer present, but he’s clearly furious that his employee is watching sports on the job. I wish I could’ve done something to keep this guy from getting in trouble, but it all happened so fast.

Regardless, it’s a huge day. It’s officially May, so we’re finally allowed to go crazy over what’s been going on, and a lot has been going on. Yordan Alvarez leads all position players in WAR. Maybe this will be the year he finally puts together a healthy season and snags an MVP, but the Astros, already nine games below .500, could cost him that shot. Rookie shortstops Kevin McGonigle and JJ Wetherholt are second and third. Rice and Elly De La Cruz, two young players who are hugely exciting for hugely different reasons, are fourth and fifth. Perhaps most improbable of all, Mike Trout is looking like Mike Trout again in sixth place.

To celebrate the miracle of the hard drive, here’s one more song that got saved. It’s from a new children’s album that I was really, really hoping to have finished before Derek Jr. arrived. I didn’t quite make it, and God knows when I’ll get to finish it now that she’s here. It’s really frustrating. I think this batch of songs contains some of the most fun stuff I’ve ever written, and it’s going to sit around for months at the very least, just waiting either for me to finally record the last few songs or for another computer disaster. Anyway, this is the one my wife likes best:

May 2
I should start by explaining that I am already close to broken before Derek Jr. wakes. I haven’t gotten much sleep recently. It has been a rough day. And night. She hasn’t slept as much as she needs to. At one point, I change her diaper five times in one hour. She’s ravenously hungry, so hungry that at one point we give in and feed her more than her stomach can handle. It’s a rookie mistake and it goes exactly how you’d expect. She finally goes to sleep, only to wake up a short time later because she’s spit up in her crib.

She goes down again, but awakes at 11:30 PM screaming for food. I change her diaper and haul her writhing body to the kitchen to retrieve a bottle from the fridge. The only game still going is the Mets and the Angels in Anaheim. We catch the top of the seventh as she eats (with interruptions for two more diaper changes, naturally). The Angels are up 3-1 thanks to a dominant performance from Reid Detmers, and Kurt Suzuki handles the situation like the old-school catcher he is. He rides the hot hand and leaves his ace out there for the seventh. (I guess Reid Detmers is an ace now. Maybe?) It’s a rookie mistake and it goes exactly how you’d expect. Double, single, sac fly. Another single and the game is tied. Two more singles and the bases are loaded. Suzuki finally decides that maybe Detmers isn’t his ace after all.

That’s all I remember, but Sam Bachman apparently wriggled out of the jam with a groundout and a strikeout, and the Angels eventually walked it off in the 10th on a single from Oswald Peraza. Presumably, Derek Jr. and I got some sleep somewhere in there too.

As is so often the case, I don’t have pictures of the hard times in the dead of night when my only companions are Derek Jr. and the pressing awareness of all the sleep that’s slowly slipping away. It’s too dark for pictures, and besides, no matter what camera settings I use, the pressing awareness of disappearing sleep doesn’t show up in photos. What I do have is pictures from the daytime, when everything is light and breezy: