Bunting Her Over (One Sixty-Two: Day 152)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day One Hundred Fifty-Two: Clayton Kershaw, Los Angeles Dodgers

All it took was a little Play-Doh. I should have known all along.

Chelsea has been more distant from me lately. She’s got a lot going on in her little head, as the transition into a new school for kindergarten has not been easy for her. She misses her mom and her grandparents and her best friend Jimmy each day, and she wishes they were with her in school. She misses me, too, but she’s used to me being out at work each day. Her Mommy and Nana, well, they’ve always been there for her. And when they’ve been gone, she’s always had her blankie. But you can’t bring a blankie with you to kindergarten.

I want to talk with Chelsea, and help her through this in all the ways I can. But when I try to engage her in conversation, she usually grunts and continues what she’s doing – playing in the yard, or watching some TV, or eating her dinner. She doesn’t want to talk about school, especially when I bring it up. If she had a solution to what she’s working through, she’d have handled it already. She doesn’t want to hear Daddy’s advice.

This evening, with my wife and older daughter out of the house for a while, Chelsea and I had some time alone together. She took her shower, put on her nightgown and asked me if she could play with Play-Doh. I said sure, and put the Play-Doh out on the table for her. I then went back to getting myself ready for work tomorrow. But somewhere in between laying out my clothes and making my sandwich, I stopped and realized that I needed to sit with my little girl far more than I needed to do anything else.

So I sat down next to Chelsea. “Do you want to play Play-Doh with me?” she asked. I told her I did. “Can you make some ice cream for me?” she asked. I told her I could. So I sat and made her a Play-Doh sundae, and she gave me a little Play-Doh cherry on top. We made a plate full of little Play-Doh balls, and worked together to create a Play-Doh Pac-Man.

After a little while, Chelsea and I looked out the window and noticed the full moon shining for us in the sky. We talked about that for a while. Dessert was in order, and Chelsea was up for apple slices with vanilla ice cream. By the time Mom and Katie got home, it felt as though they’d been gone for just a few minutes.

Chelsea and I didn’t talk about school – not this time. But we spent time together, messing around with some Play-Doh, and that’s what we needed to do first. You don’t get a runner home from first base on a single very often. But if you take the simple step of bunting him over to second, he’s likely to score on a base hit. No one’s done the sacrificing thing better in 2010 than Clayton Kershaw, the Dodgers pitcher who has a major-league-high 17 sacrifices on the year.

I bunted today, and that sacrifice brought my dialogue with Chelsea over to second base. Now that we’re there, maybe next time we can talk some more about how school is going. For tonight, though, just rolling some green Play-Doh along the table was plenty. It was perfect, in fact. Kind of like a full moon. Or a nice, soft bunt.