PHOENIX -- James McCann will do something to celebrate his wife Jessica on Sunday for Mother's Day, but make no mistake about it, there's not a day that goes by that the Diamondbacks catcher doesn't marvel at what she's done to hold their family together.
James and Jessica got married in 2014, and twin boys Christian and Kane came along in December 2017. Jessica has traveled with James from Detroit to Chicago, to Baltimore, to a Minor League stint in Gwinnett County, Ga., and now Arizona.
Along the way, it's Jessica who has held down the fort at home.
"For lack of a better term, mothers married to professional baseball players are essentially single parents for nine months out of the year," McCann said.
Initially, Jessica would relocate with the boys wherever McCann was, but now they stay in Tennessee during the school year.
"It's been especially tough for her recently since the boys have started school," McCann said. "It used to be that they were at least with me full-time. Now they're back home. And when they're home, I mean, she's truly the definition of a single parent. She's home alone and taking the kids to school, sports, birthday parties, you know, everything by herself."
It's that part of the trade-off that is the hardest for McCann. He loves baseball and feels blessed that he's able to live what for many is a dream life, but it's also hard to be away from the three of them, and he knows it asks a lot of Jessica to be both Mom and Dad while he's gone.
That the twins were born in December allowed McCann to be there for their birth, which was a blessing in itself, as they weren't scheduled to be born until February.
"They were born 10 weeks premature," McCann said. "So we spent about seven to eight weeks in the NICU. I was so thankful it was in the offseason, because my wife was at the hospital from the time she woke up to the time she went to bed. And I was trying to squeeze in workouts, and if I wasn't at the gym or the batting cages, I was at the hospital. And that's literally how our entire offseason was, from Dec. 6 through the time we left in the spring."
They went as a family to Spring Training that year, but still the burden was on Jessica, because she was the one getting up in the middle of the night and feeding the twins, and she had them from early in the morning until the evening when McCann returned from the ballpark.
The pair were blessed at that time to get help from both of their mothers, who split time helping out.
"She's stepped up and been that rock," McCann said. "She's been the foundation that keeps the family going, especially during baseball season."
That's why today and every day is Mother's Day in the McCann household.