“Panic right off the bat” is how Jerry Blevins describes the moment he and his wife Whitney realized she was going into labor.
“Are we gonna make it to the hospital? How are we getting there? We have a plan. What is the plan? What am I forgetting? Am I gonna have to deliver this thing in an Uber? What’s happening?” ran through his mind as they prepared to become first-time parents.
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Whitney reminded him of the plan, got him to chill out a little bit, and late Monday night, the day after Mother’s Day, their son Ellis Layne Blevins was born. Ellis was born on an off day for the Mets before a homestand, and the lanky lefty took his union-bargained three-day paternity leave during the Mets’ two games versus the Blue Jays. The Blevins elected not to find out the sex of their baby ahead of time — “there are so few true surprises in life” — and named him for Jerry’s brother, whose last name is Ellis.
Meet my baby boy!! pic.twitter.com/FkM9yOyasg
— Jerry Blevins (@jerryblevins) May 18, 2018
“I really got the first four days to be there, the whole day of labor then I think the first three days, so I was lucky,” Blevins said. “I mean, when we were in San Diego, my wife was here in New York City. If she goes into labor then she’s gotta do that by herself.”
Blevins grew up with a single mom, so he says “I’ve always kind of admired women and have always had powerful women in my life, but to see it firsthand, to see my best friend, my partner, go through something like that, it’s hard to put into words.”
“When my arm’s sore, I’m kind of a little cranky all the time or I’ll complain about it if my back hurts,” he said. “Not only is she handling motherhood with grace and making it look easy already — the complications of what she went through, the major trauma that happened to her body, she’s handling it with grace and that combination of power, beauty, and grace is incredible to watch.”
Jerry and Whitney first met in 2011 and were married in 2015. Early in their relationship, they talked about a timeline for kids and how Jerry wanted to wait until the back-half of his career because he had seen from teammates how tough it can be to balance fatherhood and the demands of a career in baseball. Earlier during his wife’s pregnancy, Blevins joked that he was an outlier as a man from the Midwest and in professional baseball who waited until his 30s to become a father.
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“It’s really simple for me. I just wanna be there,” Blevins said, now 34 years old and in his 12th season in the majors. “Those guys in the lower minor leagues when we were coming up who had a wife and kids… I couldn’t imagine handling that on such a low salary, with the travel… it’s just near impossible to do. It was hard to do when I was a single man, you know?”
“But those guys who had kids early get to bring them into the ballpark. I get to see [Asdrubal] Cabrera’s kid, I had Adam Laroche as a teammate and he brought Drake in all the time, and that’s great, but at the same time he missed a lot of his life growing up.”
Blevins said he talked to “everybody” about balancing baseball and a family. “I talked to [Todd] Frazier, I talked to Asdrubal. We’re gonna be going on our first road trip this week, and I talked to [hitting coach Pat] Roessler about it and he was like, ‘you guys have Facetime now.’ Back in the day, there was no such thing as paternity leave, and now at least we get three days off.” The Mets go to Milwaukee on Thursday and return a week later without a day off at home until June 4.
Still in awe about the “miracle of childbirth,” as he describes it, Blevins is left with one overwhelming takeaway from the experience.
“Women are superheroes,” he said shaking his head. “It’s really just that simple.”
(Photo Credit: Gregory J. Fisher-USA TODAY Sports)
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