WASHINGTON – Second baseman Daniel Murphy wasn’t trying to be a parenting icon when he missed the Mets’ first two games this year for the birth of his first child, he told a White House forum Monday on working fathers.
He was just thinking about how his decision might play out with his son later on, he said.
Fresh off a three-hit game on Sunday, Murphy — accompanied by his wife, Tori, and two-month-old son, Noah — said he was determined to be there for his family.
“When Noah asks me one day, ‘What happened? What was it like when I was born?’ I could have answered, ‘Well, Stephen Strasburg hung me a breaking ball that day, son. I slammed it into the right field corner,'” Murphy said.
“But I think it’s gonna go so much farther in that I am the one who cut his umbilical cord.”
Murphy, 29, took some talk radio heat but also received wide support for using two days of the three days of parental leave baseball offers fathers.
“I wanted to be there. I wanted to be there for my wife and for my son,” he said.
“Long after they tell me I am not good enough to play baseball anymore, I’ll be a husband, and I’ll be a father.”
Murphy acknowledged he isn’t around as much as he would like.
Thanking his wife, he noted “she is at the end of an 11-day road trip where (she) has been single mother. And that is something that I think gets a little bit left out in the cold.”
Murphy said his Mets teammates teased him when he returned from his parental leave, but not because he had taken time off.
“They were all over me — I didn’t have cigars ready when I came back. So, I got blasted. So I had to grab the American Express, give it to a clubhouse guy and get 50 cigars out,” Murphy said.
“They walked in, they were like, ‘Dude we’re going on a road trip, where are our cigars?’ he said.
Addressing a secular crowd that heard from advocates for same-sex parenting, Murphy made it clear that religion plays a big role in his approach to fatherhood.
“We try to take Jesus Christ and we try to put him in the center of everything,” he said. “So Instead of okay, I’m a father; I’m a husband; I’m a baseball player, I just try to take Jesus, put him right in the middle.”
Murphy and his family got a tour of the White House East Wing before the event. “I never got my parents into the White House, and he’s done it at nine weeks,” Murphy said of his son. “So touche.”
After the forum, Murphy caught a cab with his family outside the White House. He was carefully holding his baby, unnoticed by passing tourists, just another modern dad.
dfriedman@nydailynews.com
