This story was excerpted from Zachary Silver’s Orioles Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

Austin Hays is having the best season of his career and is the Orioles' most promising candidate for a nod to the All-Star Game in July. This June, he's celebrating Father's Day with two, not just one, young ones, his second son Hayden having been born in March. Those sentences are intertwined, as he reflected on this Father's Day:

It gives Father's Day a whole new meaning. It used to just be about sending my dad a gift and wishing him a happy Father's Day. But now, getting other people to share their gratitude of me being a father and being on the other end of that, the receiving end of Father's Days, it's cool. It's part of life, growing into different roles, and being able to grow into that is something that I take a lot of pride in. I love it. I love it.

Three years ago, (Samantha and I) weren't even married yet, and now I'm a married guy with two kids and one of them's almost 2 years old. It happens quick, for sure. But I still feel like the same person; I just feel like my sense of responsibilities have changed a little bit. I'm a lot more patient now than I was before I had children. It's been a fun journey so far.

It was always hard to see baseball as just a game, or even just see it as my job. I felt like it was my entire life, and I was living and dying on what happened at the field that day or how my game went that day. But now, having children when you come home, they don't care how you did or how you played that day, whether it was a good or bad game, if your team won or lost. It's made baseball easy to just accept what it is -- it's a game, and that's what I do for a living.

Just like anyone else, you've got to leave your work at work, and when you come home to your family, enjoy your time with them. It's made doing that a lot easier. A lot easier. No matter what, when I get home, they're smiling at me and they're happy to see me, and they want to cuddle and hang out. It's made the game a little bit easier to just accept whatever happens that day.

The other side of it, too, is I have to manage my time so well now. I'm sacrificing my time with my children at home to be at the field every day and do my job. I'm not taking anything for granted while I'm here, just a little more focused on my work and what I'm doing, because I am sacrificing my time that I can use with my children here at the field and at work.

I just think it made me a little more focused on everything that I'm doing, and it gives me a little more just a sense of everything that I do here matters. Like, I can't back off, I can't slack off, because I do have to provide for my kids. But once the work is done for that day, it's done, it's here. Now I'm going to go home to my family.

You become a lot more patient, ready to roll with the punches a little bit. You're not in control of everything. When I was always on my own, I'm controlling where I go, what time I wake up -- you can have everything down to a 'T.' Once you have children, that's not the case. If the kids are sick, if they're not feeling good, you can't make them do anything they don't want to do, you can't make them wake up at certain times. You're a little less in control of everything, and that might be why it makes baseball a little bit easier to just accept whatever's happening, not get caught up in the emotions of that. Because there are things in baseball that are just out of your control. Having kids is kind of like the ups and downs of the game, in a way.