Shawn Green, record-holding former MLB player, is now a dad who is happy to talk about fatherhood and how his life has changed.
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As the only male in his house, Shawn Green is outnumbered. He has two daughters: Presley (“spelled
like Elvis, but not named after him”) will be 13 in December and Chandler is 10. The former Major
League All-Star, who played for two of the four finalists in this year’s MLB playoffs (the New York Mets and Toronto Blue Jays), and three of the playoff teams overall (also the Los Angeles Dodgers) is now a regular dad who, like the rest of us, tells bad dad jokes (but when pressed, has a hard time picking a favorite), has a mother-in-law to deal with, and has to get creative about getting it on.
We caught up with Shawn on the eve of Game 7 of the National League Division Series between the Mets and Dodgers.
1. PS: What do you wish someone had told you about being a dad before Presley was born?
SG: I think, everyone’s pretty apt to tell you…to give you advice and tell you how it’s going to be. I think everyone tells you how fast it’s going to go, which is definitely true, and you really only understand it once you’ve experienced it. But it’s amazing how quickly they go from being a baby that you’re holding to having the door slammed and they’re on the phone with their friends.
2. PS: Was there anything that just sort of hit you in the face when you brought her home from the hospital and suddenly thought “Oh my god, where are the grown-ups?”
SG: Yeah, for sure. You don’t know what you’re doing at first and then…The first year, the baby, she was really constipated so that was the biggest stress, playing baseball out on the road and calling my wife to see if she pooped that day. So that was something you don’t expect to have as the number one stress in your life.
3. PS: Now that they’re a little bit older, is there anything they tease you about?
SG: Oh yeah, they love to tease me, especially my little one, she’s very quick and sharp-witted. We all poke [fun] at each other all the time. I like to do that because I like to keep them from getting too big of an ego or take themselves too seriously. I like to joke around with them and I think it’s been a positive outcome because I really like the way their personalities are shaping up.
PS: What do they tease you about? What do they poke at you about?
SG: It’s hard to think of an exact thing. They like to make fun of the way I look, if I have hair growing in odd places … a long hair on my eyebrow, or who knows. As girls, they’re very quick to notice and point out appearance type critiques.
4. PS: Have either of your kids ever walked in on you and your wife when you were having “adult alone time?”
SG: No, not when they’ve ever realized it. For our 10 year-old, we have a mattress on the floor in our room because she still sleeps in our room. So we’ve got to be creative and make sure she’s asleep. It takes a little bit of the romance out but you figure out ways around it.
5. PS: What’s the most inconvenient time you’ve ever had to drop everything and take one of them to the bathroom? Have you ever been on a really long line, finally get near the front and then get “Daddy, Daddy, I really need to go!”?
SG: Well, it’s been a good five or six years since I’ve had to deal with that stuff. Nothing jumps to mind. It’s usually when I’m carrying a bunch of stuff, maybe at the airport or something and anxious to get to the baggage claim or the car or wherever, and all of a sudden they all have to go to the bathroom and everything gets thrown on my shoulders to keep trekking along, like a pack mule.
PS: In situations like that, do you ever get noticed and have fans come up to you when you’re trying to carry everything for your wife and daughters and “Oh my god, you’re Shawn Green!”?
SG: Yeah. I mean, that stuff happens less frequently, but it still happens, particularly when I’m in L.A. I live an hour from L.A., so when I’m in L.A. or New York or Toronto, in those places it happens but mostly I’m able to slip through the cracks. My kids dig it when someone comes up to me because they don’t really remember my playing days.
PS: Do they, or does the older one, have a favorite memory from your playing days? Is there anything they remember?
SG: Well, actually, they remember I brought them…we were playing in Philly my last year, I think, and they were giving out these Elmo, and it was some kind of pizza sponsor, so they had Elmo with like a pizza maker and so I brought those home and they remember the pizza Elmo. That was a big deal to them, the pizza Elmo.
PS: Did they have a favorite teammate of yours?
SG: They know some of my favorite teammates from over the years. They’ve heard me talk about guys, they know Carlos Delgado and Dave Roberts. They’ve heard a lot of the names, Adrian Beltre…and they’ve met guys. I mean, my oldest was 4 and a half when I stopped playing and my little one was 2, so they didn’t really get to know anyone well at that age.
6. PS: Do you have a best/worst diaper change story? Scott Brosius shared with me that he and his wife were at a movie when their first child was a baby and they had to deal with a diaper explosion.
SG: Ours was more constipation related. One of our daughters was scared to go on the toilet, so we had to finally put her in a pull-up and cut a hole in the bottom and have her sit on the toilet so she thought she was going in the pull-up and then she sat there and that’s how she was finally able to go on the toilet. That was not really a diaper changing, but I mean, she would hold it for multiple days, sometimes up to a week, so you can imagine what the result was.
7. PS: Was there, or is there, anything they watch or listen to that just drives you crazy?
SG: Yeah, there was…it drove us crazy to the point it was funny. What was the name of it? I don’t know, it was “I like to eat apples and bananas.”
PS: Ugh, I HATE that song.
SG: We were in Vero Beach and played it over and over again because my oldest daughter loved it, and it was…the voices were adults trying to sound like kids and it was the apples and bananas song and we probably heard that thing 20 times a day.
PS: Ucch, that’s a bad one, I feel for you.
8. PS: Obviously you want your kids to take away a lot from what you teach them, but if there’s one lesson you want your kids to take from you and move on through life with, what would it be?
SG: A couple. One would be to treat people well all the time and always show a lot of respect, and the other would be to just learn how to be more present in life. It’s really hard nowadays with all the electronics and stuff, and I’m guilty too, but that’s something I think is really important in order to lead a happy, fulfilled life.
9. PS: Is there anything you swore you’d never say when you became a dad that you find yourself saying all the time? For me it’s “Because.” I always thought “Don’t tell me ‘Because,’” but now I say it all the time, “Because I said so, that’s why.”
SG: (laughing) Right, I don’t say that one. I guess I do drop the “There’s kids in Africa, or really poor kids who can’t afford these things and they’re happy” when they’re complaining about something they don’t have or don’t want to eat something. Talk about kids who are living on dirt floors in huts. I throw that one out there, for sure.
PS: You mentioned not eating stuff, are either of your kids picky eaters?
SG: My little one, my other one has grown out of it, but my little one is like mac and cheese all the time. She actually loves matzoh ball soup and she’ll eat it…we probably have matzoh ball soup in our house every other week, a pot made, and she’ll eat it for pretty much every meal for about three days straight.
PS: I mean, I would eat matzoh ball soup all the time too if I could, but nobody makes it in my house. So what do you do? Do you just make the few things she likes to eat?
SG: I guess in the old days we’d just eat whatever was for dinner. For the most part we have dinners that are pretty consistent. One day it’ll be steak, one day it’ll be burgers, one day it’ll be chicken. There are probably five or six things that circulate through. We try as much as we can to not always give them the simple kid food, we try to expand it a little bit.
PS: Now that you’re not playing and home more, do you grill a lot?
SG: I do, I love to barbecue, and especially being out in California, you can do it all year round, which is great.
PS: It’s funny, I live in Rochester, NY and we have winter for like, seven months a year and I grill throughout the winter in the snow, and I have to say, I love it. I mean, I’d rather be in southern California where it’s nice all year round, but there’s something nice about going out in the cold with a beer and grilling. What’s your “go-to” on the grill?
SG: I’m pretty simple. Steak, chicken with the bone in, hot dogs and burgers. And then I’ll throw some veggies on there too, some sweet peppers, some onions, sometimes some asparagus or something. But yeah, I like to barbecue. We usually do it, maybe two times a week.
10. PS: I’m starting to get attitude already and my kids are 10, 8 and 5 and the older two are boys, so I can’t even imagine what it’s like with an almost teenage girl and a 10 year-old girl. Have you ever played the “I didn’t play on Yom Kippur during a pennant race” card with them to end a discussion or argument?
SG: (Laughs loudly) No, I don’t throw that one out there. There are times…if I’m going to brag to anyone, it’s going to be to my girls. My little one, especially, they’re both really good dancers and so sometimes I’ll relate stuff to baseball and if there’s a game on, especially now in the playoffs, I’ll let them know how hard it is to hit and say stuff like “You know, that ball is coming in at 98 miles per hour, that’s the kind of stuff I had to try to do,” so I’ll try to make sure they know that it’s not easy. But I don’t think it really registers.
PS: Do either of them play any sports?
SG: Dance is like 12 hours a week for each of them, two or three hours a day after school.
PS: Do they love the dance to the point that either one of them would try and do it professionally?
SG: Yeah, my oldest especially. She’s obsessed. She approaches it the way I approached baseball. It was all I wanted to do and that’s how she is with dance.
PS: What would you tell your girls about pursuing that as a career as opposed to maybe going to school first?
SG: I think it’s a lot different from an opportunity standpoint. It’s a lot less of a clear path than baseball is. It’s a pretty obvious path in baseball, whereas dance there’s a lot of tangents you could go off on and if you’re a really good dancer it’s still really hard to have a successful career. As of right now she’s definitely convinced that college is the way to go, but she wants to go somewhere where they have a good dance or theater program.
11. PS: Interestingly, you’ve played on three of the teams that are still alive (Mets, Dodgers and Blue Jays). Who are you rooting for?
SG: Um, well in the American League it’s easy: Toronto. I actually, I feel like…I’m pretty close to the Dodgers these days, but I also like the Mets. I wouldn’t say I’m a big fan at this point. I enjoy watching the games and as the games are going on you find yourself pulling…you find your heart going one way or another, so yeah, it’s hard. Even the Cubs, I’d love to see the Cubs in the World Series as well.
Even when I was playing and wasn’t in the postseason, I kind of root for cities that I really like and feel like the fans are supportive, and I think all the teams in there fit the equation.
PS: Do your girls like watching baseball?
SG: Not at all.
PS: Do you ever go to games together?
SG: Noooo, no. Uh uh. I mean, I’ll go to Dodger Stadium if I have some sort of event or some reason to be there, like for an Old Timer’s Day or something, but they don’t really have any desire to watch games. They’ll flip the channel and put on [something else] …
… What? (unintelligible speaking from someone else) No, I’m on the phone. Sorry about that, it’s my mother-in-law.
PS: You know what the difference is between in-laws and outlaws, right?
SG: What?
PS: Outlaws are wanted.
SG: (laughs) That’s right. Funny.
PS: Do your in-laws live near you?
SG: Yes, everyone does. On both sides. What were we talking about?
PS: You were saying they flip the channel. What do they watch?
SG: That’s right. The little one watches all the Disney shows and my older one is always in her room watching Netflix on her laptop.
PS: Do you struggle with them always being on electronics?
SG: Yeah, it’s hard. The good news is, in my house with the girls dancing for 2-3 hours, I actually don’t feel that bad if they’re on their electronics for an hour or more when they go to bed in the evening because they’re getting their exercise, so that’s the key. And as a kid I liked playing Atari and Nintendo, so I did all that stuff but I was always playing baseball as well. And I’m a bad example because as adults, we’re always texting or playing games on my phone, looking at emails and sending emails and it’s a challenge for everyone. I think it’s just kind of the way of the world now. They pick it up quickly, that’s for sure.
Hey, do me a favor, when you write this, don’t put her name on the pooping thing, because she might never talk to me again.
PS: I will NOT put her name in, I will just say “One of my daughters,” and then maybe both of them can be mad at you.
SG: (laughs) That’s right, I’d rather that.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
