Late on the night of Oct. 8, 2021, then-Boston Red Sox left-hander Chris Sale sat thunderstruck at his locker. He had just turned in the worst start of his career, yanked after a five-run first-inning implosion in the American League Division Series. Boston’s bats had bailed him out, but it was Sale’s poor form that would overwhelm the talk-radio airwaves the next day.
After sitting for a while in silence, Sale turned to Red Sox reliever Garrett Whitlock and said: “Want to know what the best part of today is?”
Whitlock laughed. “There was a good part?” he asked.
“Now I get to go home and not be Chris Sale,” Sale said. “I’m just Dad.”
The tension between the relentless demands of the game and the pull of home is felt in each Major League Baseball clubhouse. One morning last summer, Mauricio Dubón was in tears driving to the ballpark. It was a getaway day ahead of a weeklong road trip. It was also Father’s Day. Dubón, a new dad, was grappling with leaving his infant son, Luciano, on that day, of all days.
Dubón’s job doesn’t require navigating a truck through the streets of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, as his dad’s did. He doesn’t live paycheck to paycheck. Yet in a line of work that consumes the calendar with travel and time away from family, Dubón, a utility player for the Atlanta Braves, thinks constantly about how to balance being a big leaguer and an involved parent.
He finds himself pulling aside his fellow major-league dads, from Sale to José Altuve to Freddie Freeman, and asking a question familiar to so many other parents with demanding jobs: “How do you do it?”
Most baseball dads have a story about a milestone moment missed: first word, step, lost tooth, ballet recital, Little League game. One that hits hard at this time of year: first day of school. Many major-league families spend summers together but split up at the start of the school year. Some players will rejoin their families in a few weeks. Others won’t be home until after Halloween.
Before dispensing any advice about juggling parenting and pitching, Milwaukee Brewers starter Brandon Woodruff, like other dads interviewed for this story, would like two caveats printed, please. The first is that he doesn’t even have the toughest job in his own household. His wife, Jonie, had a baby in July. Now she’s home with the couple’s three children in small-town Mississippi. “I praise everything she does,” Woodruff said.
The second caveat is that Woodruff makes enough money to make sure his kids’ kids are taken care of, and to make some problems go away. He’s acutely aware of how fortunate he has been throwing baseballs for a living.
That said, the community of major-league dads summarily rejects that old line from “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” They most certainly care if they ever get back.
When Woodruff broke into the majors a decade ago, he didn’t understand why older teammates often brought their families on the team’s road trips.
“Now,” he said, “I totally get it.”
Mauricio Dubón, now with the Braves, says of son Luciano: “He changes a little bit every time you leave.” (Erik Williams / Imagn Images)
Here’s a thought exercise that has amused Texas Rangers reliever Trevor Williams for some time: What if we kept dad stats? What if the numbers on the back of a baseball card were replaced with diapers changed, bottles warmed, car seats installed, bedtime stories read, children tucked in?
“The last thing I want to do when I get home is sit at the chessboard to play my 8-year-old,” Williams said. “But if he’s been practicing all day and that’s all he wants to do, that dad stat — played chess — goes a long way.”
The answers to Dubón’s exploration — how to be the parent you want to be while playing in the big leagues — tend to land on the same point: Be present, wherever you are. “When I’m home, I’m home,” Red Sox shortstop Trevor Story said. “That’s my one job: making the moments matter.” Baltimore Orioles starter Chris Bassitt said: “Around the kids, I’m not a baseball player.” Arizona Diamondbacks catcher James McCann said, “When you go home, you’re putting on a different hat. You’re Dad.” Williams wants a dad stat for being present. Let’s call it xFT, he said. Expected family time.
It seems Williams, his wife, Jackie, and their five kids live progressively farther from his home ballpark each year. The drive helps divide the two worlds. “I needed to shut off my brain,” Williams said. “I needed to separate Trevor, the baseball player, from Trevor, the dad and husband.”
Before kids, Sandy León, a journeyman catcher in the Braves organization, was known to stew after bad games. He’d vent to his wife, Liliana. Now, with three children, León said, he challenges himself to come home “the same person” he was when he left. Children have a way of sniffing out when a parent is distracted by a bad day at work. “They can feel that energy if I’m coming home and being an a-hole,” Woodruff said, “thinking about the slider that got hit for a homer.”
When Dubón sought advice from Freeman last year, the Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman and father of four said being a parent had made him a better baseball player. The delighted children awaiting him at home were a welcome distraction from whatever happened at the field that day.
Dubón has noticed he dwells less on the highs and lows of baseball now that Luciano is around. “He doesn’t know you went 0 for 4,” Dubón said. “He just knows Dad is home.”
McCann’s 8-year-old twins, Carter and Kane, are old enough to know the difference between 0 for 4 and 4 for 4. They occasionally question their dad’s pitch selection. They understand a loss means they can’t venture into the clubhouse after the game. (Dad’s rules.) But McCann finds it refreshing that, for now, his sons don’t care about baseball stats or win/loss records.
“They just want to spend time with you,” he said.
Stephen Vogt brought his young children on the field for Family Day at Miller Park in 2017, but such togetherness is rare during the season. “It’s hard,” he said. (Benny Sieu / Imagn Images)
Stephen Vogt was eager to spend time with his kids, too.
During a July 2022 dinner date in Chicago, when Vogt and his wife, Alyssa, agreed that the season with the Oakland Athletics would be his last as a player, the veteran catcher went back and forth about whether to take a year or two off before jumping into coaching. Alyssa did not waffle. If you want to coach, she told her husband, do it immediately: Don’t let these kids get used to the idea of you being home all the time, she said.
The next season, Vogt commuted from the family’s home in Olympia, Wash., to work as the Seattle Mariners bullpen coach. He was still away enough that toward the end of the season his three children hung a rainbow-colored “Welcome Home” banner in the upstairs hallway.
Then came the offer to manage the Cleveland Guardians.
These days, Vogt spends much of the year three time zones away from his family. A friend once told Vogt there’s no such thing as work-life balance: It’s work-life harmony. So, Vogt strives to maintain harmony. He ducks into the bathroom connected to his office at Progressive Field to FaceTime his family while they eat breakfast. He calls again an hour before first pitch and after the game. In the first half of this season, Vogt twice took cross-country flights on off days to see his family for a night.
But the nature of the job is such that time together is brief. Texts and calls are unsatisfying substitutes for everyday conversation with your kids as they grow up. “That’s the hardest part for me,” Vogt said. “I look at it as: I’m working my butt off to provide a life for them, and I’m a very involved dad. I’m not unaware of anything. I don’t go days without talking to them.”
Still, he said, “It’s hard.”
For veteran big-league dads, the late-career calculus about when to hang up the spikes can be less about whether their body can continue for another season than whether their family can.
A question was eating at Bassitt early this season, in the months after he turned 37 and signed a one-year contract with the Orioles.
Should I be here?
Not here, as in Baltimore. (Though his kids did prefer his previous bird logo.) Here, as in the big leagues. Bassitt is deeply conscientious about the impact that his playing career, and his choice to extend it, has on his children, 6-year-old Landry and 2-year-old Colson. Landry is in school now. She took up soccer. Bassitt has never seen her play.
“I never want to look back in 10 or 15 years,” Bassitt said, “and be like, ‘I should never have played this year. I should have been with my daughter. She needed me. I didn’t know it at the time, but she needed me.’”
The feeling isn’t exactly guilt, Bassitt explained, but concern. He and his wife, Jessica, have talked a lot about how to know it’s time to retire. It may be Landry who decides. “She’s a rock star,” Bassitt said, “But there’s going to come a point in time when — and I’m saying this positively, not negatively — I’m going to be done because of her. I want to be there for her. If she needs me every day, I’m going to be there every day.”
Life after baseball was on Williams’ mind last week when he was released by the Washington Nationals. He flew to San Diego to help Jackie and the kids pack up their old house ahead of a cross-country move to the forever home they bought in Virginia. Being home together in the stretch run of the baseball season felt like a sneak peek into the next chapter of the family’s life.
Last Tuesday, the day before the movers arrived, the Rangers called. “Jackie was like, of course you leave right before the moving truck comes,” Williams said. Off he went again.
That same day, Vogt’s wife and kids returned to Washington for the start of the school year. At home in Olympia, the “Welcome Home” banner is still on the wall.
“They just leave it up,” Vogt said. “It sucks.”
Sonny Gray, then with the A’s, had a blast with his son Gunnar during the Home Run Derby at the 2015 All-Star Game. (Elsa / Getty Images)
Parenting has turned Red Sox starter Sonny Gray into an early riser. Lately, his mornings have been a lot quieter: The boys are back in school.
Gray was 14 when his father died in a car crash. He will soon be 37, four years younger than his dad, Jesse, was at the time. He still writes “DAD” in silver marker on the brim of his cap. “The older you get, you realize that the most precious thing we have as humans is time,” Gray said.
His sons — Gunnar, 11, and Declan, 7 — spent the summer in Gray’s big-league orbit, bouncing in and out of the home clubhouse at Fenway Park. Now they’re back home, south of Nashville. Gray and his wife, Jessica, have homeschooled in the past to keep the family together all season. “We’ve tried everything,” Gray said. This year, it’s public school.
Big-league families are constantly searching for the setup that works for them. That can evolve dramatically from year to year. It gets increasingly complicated as kids get older and have their own activities cluttering the calendar, Gray said. Families with younger children might hire night nurses, nannies or lean upon relatives for extra help. Schooling options range from traditional school to homeschool, tutors, traveling teachers and virtual classes. Some families travel to most road series. Others find it’s not worth the hassle.
When Tampa Bay Rays outfielder Jake Fraley’s son, Jayce, was born in 2017, Fraley was the only dad on the High-A Charlotte Stone Crabs. His wife, Angelica, couldn’t leave Miami for a month. Fraley was miserable. His play suffered. “After that,” Fraley recalled, “me and my wife sat down, and I said, ‘I don’t care how much this costs. You guys are going to be with me everywhere I go for as long as I play.’”
Even with careful planning and unwavering proximity, Fraley later found himself nearly stepping away from the game for his family’s sake. In October 2023, his daughter, Avery, who was 5 at the time, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a cancer of the bone marrow and blood. During the 2024 season, Fraley took Avery to 6 a.m. chemotherapy appointments, then left for the ballpark around noon. “It was the hardest season of my life,” he said.
Avery completed her two-year treatment program this spring, before the family headed out for her father’s eighth season in the majors.
Like the Fraleys, the Williams kids are homeschooled. Williams sits down with Isaac, now a fifth grader, for two hours each weekday morning, while Jackie teaches the couple’s two first graders and a nanny watches the two youngest. “That school time is so precious to me,” Williams said.
Williams has learned to leave his phone in another room when he’s home. His parenting has been influenced by his own father, Richard, a Stage 4 cancer survivor who has spent retirement flying back and forth across the country to watch his son pitch. One night last week, Williams texted his dad that he’d be the Rangers’ opener the next day. Richard booked a flight.
“His superpower has always been just showing up,” Williams said.
Williams hopes his kids will see him the same way.
Before a recent road game, Arizona Diamondbacks catcher Gabriel Moreno was on a video call with his family when 2-year-old Gabriel Jr. dropped the Spanish slang term bárbaro — translation: unbelievable. Moreno doubled over laughing. “Where did you learn that?!” he asked.
Junior had overheard his dad and “Domo” — Diamondbacks infielder Geraldo Perdomo — saying it in the clubhouse. Junior is his father’s shadow. He wants to catch like him, hit like him, run the bases like him.
“Everything he sees, he wants to do,” Moreno said. “Everything he hears, he wants to say.”
Lately, Junior has been missing his dad more than ever. He’s always asking to play. Moreno’s wife, Rosmila, has her hands full with a newborn, Gianna. Moreno wishes he were around more. But while his career provides his kids things most will never have — like access to perfectly manicured fields to use as their playgrounds — it demands an extraordinary share of his time.
Many big-league dads struggle with that trade-off. Woodruff sometimes can’t shake the thought that by continuing to chase his baseball dreams, he’s missing his kids’ childhoods.
“You want to look back on those years and enjoy that time with them,” he said. “My wife and I are living right in the middle of the funnest times with our kids — and I’m not getting to see them.”
Among the many moments major-league dads miss back home, none is more guilt-inducing than the newborn phase. Players can be placed on MLB’s paternity list for one to three days; they scramble to get to the delivery and are sometimes gone before mother and baby have been discharged.
Each of Woodruff’s three kids was born during the season. One arrived while he was home rehabbing a shoulder injury. Those were some of the darkest days of his baseball career, he said, and some of the best as a dad.
The McCanns are expecting their third child in October.
“Hopefully I’m between playoff series,” McCann said, “and we manage to make it work.”
McCann is 36. This child, unlike the older brothers, will grow up with a former big-league dad.
McCann and his wife, Jessica, have tried giving their boys the best of both worlds — big-league life and a normal childhood back home, with school friends and youth sports teams. He has cherished seeing his sons grow up around the game. When they come to the field before games, he said, “I don’t see them for two hours.” They shag early batting practice, watch bullpens, play catch, field grounders with the infielders, then fix themselves a plate of food before going back out for more BP.
McCann carries those memories with him. He needs them on the days when the only glimpse of his sons’ Little League games is the shaky, out-of-focus videos his wife, Jessica, takes through a chain-link fence. “Hearing their excitement when they call me and say they had three hits, or made a nice play, and knowing I didn’t get to see it,” he said, “that’s probably the hardest part.”
Ross Stripling now sees all the moments he used to miss. The right-hander retired last year after nine seasons in the majors. A life that had revolved around baseball came to a standstill. He retired the same day his third son was born. This time, Stripling stayed in the newborn bubble. He was the only dad at his oldest son’s Easter egg hunt and his middle son’s gymnastics class. Some days, he said, “All I did was be Dad, and I was totally fulfilled.”
After about a year, he felt increasingly agitated.
“There’s some instinct habitually that understands that something is out of whack and I need to go do something,” Stripling said one day this spring. “I’m slowly trying to figure out what that is.”
Pete Alonso often gets home too late to interact with Teddy: “I’ll look at the monitor and go, man, I can’t wait to see him tomorrow.” (James A. Pittman / Imagn Images)
When Pete Alonso hit free agency last fall, he was preoccupied not by contract projections and negotiations but by diaper changes and swaddles. His son, Teddy, was born Sept. 21, 2025, a week before the end of Alonso’s final season with the New York Mets.
Alonso is meticulous in all things, so it should come as no surprise that he spent the early days of the offseason analyzing the family operation. He determined cleaning and organizing fell under his purview. “How can I leave our system intact so that everything has its place?” he recalled thinking.
Over the years, Alonso watched many teammates become fathers. He picked their brains a bit before realizing most of it wouldn’t make sense until he and his wife, Haley, were in that situation. Now, he understands why so many said having kids would change how it felt to come home.
When Alonso returns late after Orioles road trips now, he does so on tiptoes. He walks quietly and fights the urge to visit Teddy in the nursery, lest a woken baby ruin everyone’s night. Then one of the most feared sluggers in the sport stoops over to pick up the baby monitor from the bedside stand. “I’ll look at the monitor,” Alonso said, “and go, man, I can’t wait to see him tomorrow.”
In Atlanta, Dubón feels the same. When he’s home, he’s not a major leaguer. He’s Luciano’s dad. Dubón reminds himself to be present. Luciano is 1 now. He loves splashing in the pool and going to the playground. Dubón often puts him down for a nap before heading to work. But the time together flies.
“He changes a little bit every time you leave,” Dubón said.
On Father’s Day last year, Dubón stepped to the plate with two outs in the 10th inning of a tied game. He wore blue batting gloves and wagged a blue bat over his right shoulder. He was in one of the deepest slumps of his career: 1 for his last 25.
Dubón timed a cutter at the top of the strike zone and banged it off the wall for a walk-off single. Teammates spilled onto the field to swarm Dubón. In the stands, his wife, Nancy, held Luciano and cheered until she cried. During a postgame interview, Dubón tried to find the words to describe what he was feeling. His eyes welled up. He still had a plane to catch. He still hated leaving little Luciano. But at least he’d always remember their first Father’s Day together.
Dubón scooped his son into his arms. As Luciano pawed at his father’s necklace, Dubón said, “That was incredible.”
— Zack Meisel contributed to this report