What it’s like balancing baseball, fatherhood

This story was excerpted from Adam McCalvy's Brewers Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

Left-hander Brent Suter was a timely guest for the most recent edition of the Brewers Unfiltered podcast for two reasons. One, as of last week he is a published author with the release of his children’s book, “The Binky Bandit,” starring the family dog, Wally. Two, he recently became a dad the second time over.

As we celebrate Father’s Day this coming weekend, it's an opportune time to excerpt a portion of Suter’s visit with me and Bally Sports Wisconsin’s Tim Dillard on the pod as Brent talked about baseball and being a dad. Props are due to his “superhero” wife, Erin, and the couple’s energetic older son, Liam.

Here’s my favorite exchange between Brent and Tim about fatherhood:

Brent Suter: Three weeks ago we had Layton and he’s a bundle of joy, he’s awesome. He’s eating like crazy, sleeping pretty well, but the coolest part was bringing him home and seeing Liam’s reaction to being the big brother. All of a sudden he was like, 'Oh, this is sweet! I’m going to be the role model!' It was so cute and awesome.

Having a baby in season has definitely presented some challenges, for sure. But my wife has been a superhero and she says, ‘You’ve got Liam at night and I have Layton.’ She kicked me out of the bedroom and all that so we can try to sleep when the kids are sleeping. She’s been a superhero about that.

But I’ll be honest with you: Those first couple of days back after having the baby and being in the hospital, it was like, ‘I want to be home right now snuggling my baby.’ You know what I mean? There was as much resistance to being at the park as I’ve ever experienced, so I just had to fight through that. Since then, it’s been a lot better. There’s some difficulties, but there’s so many blessings to having an in-season baby.

Tim Dillard: I think a lot of times people forget that you guys are humans. Baseball is your job, but life doesn’t stop because you’re playing baseball. Luckily, I had my three in the offseason. I don’t know how that worked out. But for guys who do it in the season, you get this huge shot of perspective, right? It slaps you in the face. Then you go back to baseball and it’s like, ‘This is strange.’ For whatever reason, you’ve changed a little bit. How do you feel now? Do you feel there is some freedom there now, like, ‘I can’t control everything there is'?

Suter: You know, that’s a great question because I have felt that freedom. I have been failing more on the mound than I ever have probably in my career. Not necessarily bad pitches all the time. It’s been weak hits and stuff like that. I definitely could be pitching better, for sure, but I have peace about it and I’m not beating myself up. I’m disappointed and I’m hungry to get better and it’s clear what I need to get better at. A lot of times in the past, I would have beaten myself up almost relentlessly and said, ‘I don’t belong here.’ Now it’s like, OK, the league is responding to me, the game is pressing on me a little bit, now I need to respond and make some adjustments.

Definitely having that second child has opened up freedom, because I’ve probably been failing more since we had him, but at the same time there’s a path forward and there’s a clarity about what I need to do. It’s a blessing in many, many ways.