Make Me Commissioner: I Know What's Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It

by Jane Leavy

“Make Jane Commissioner… Leavy has a voice demanding to be heard—and Major League Baseball should listen.” — THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

A New York Times bestselling biographer and lifelong baseball devotee takes readers on an epic journey through the game that baseball has become— a heartfelt manifesto that's perfect for lovers of the sport.

Jane Leavy has always loved baseball. Her grandmother lived one long, loud foul ball away from Yankee Stadium—the same grandmother who took young Jane to Saks Fifth Avenue and bought her her first baseball glove. It's no coincidence that Leavy was covering the game she loved for the Washington Post by the late 1970s. As a pioneering female sportswriter, she eventually turned her talent to books, penning three of the all-time best baseball biographies about three of the all-time best Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, and Babe Ruth. But when she went searching for a fourth biographical subject, she realized that baseball had faltered. The Moneyball era of the last two decades obsessed over data and slowed the game down to a crawl, often at the expense of thrills, skills, and surprise. Major League Baseball has begun to address issues too long ignored, yet the questions how much have these efforts helped to improve the game and reassert its place in American culture?

Leavy takes a whirlwind tour of the country seeking answers to these questions, talking with luminaries like Joe Torre, Dave Roberts, Jim Palmer, Dusty Baker, and more. What Leavy uncovers is not only what’s wrong with baseball—and how to fix it—but also what’s right with baseball, and how it illuminates characters, tells stories, and fires up the imagination of those who love it and everyone who could discover it anew.

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Nonfiction, History, Audiobook, Business

377 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 9, 2025

About the author

Jane Leavy is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Last Boy, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy and the comic novel Squeeze Play, which Entertainment Weekly called “the best novel ever written about baseball.” Her latest book is The Big Fella. She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 1979 to1988, first in the sports section, then writing for the style section. She covered baseball, tennis, and the Olympics for the paper. She wrote features for the style section about sports, politics, and pop culture, including, most memorably, a profile of Mugsy Bogues, the 5’3″ guard for the Washington Wizards, which was longer than he is tall.

Before joining the The Washington Post, she was a staff writer at womenSports and Self magazines. She has written for many publications, including The New York Times, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, The Village Voice, and The New York Daily News. Leavys work has been anthologized in many collections, including Best Sportswriting, Coach: 25 Writers Reflect on People Who Made a Difference, Child of Mine: Essays on Becoming a Mother, Nike Is a Goddess: The History of Women in Sports, Diamonds Are a Girls Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball, A Kind of Grace: A Treasury of Sportswriting by Women, and Making Words Dance: Reflections on Red Smith, Journalism and Writing.

She grew up on Long Island where she pitched briefly and poorly for the Blue Jays of the Roslyn Long Island Little League. On her parents first date, her father, a water boy for the 1927 New York football Giants, took her mother to a Brooklyn College football game. She retaliated by taking him to Loehmanns after the final whistle. It was a template for their 63-year union. As a child, Jane Leavy worshipped Mickey Mantle from the second-floor ballroom in the Concourse Plaza Hotel where her grandmothers synagogue held services on the High Holidays.

Jane Leavy attended Barnard College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she wrote her masters essay (later published in The Village Voice) on Red Smith, the late sports columnist for The New York Times, who was her other childhood hero.

She has two adult children, Nick and Emma, and she lives in Washington, DC, and Truro, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Theo Logos · Rating 4 out of 5]

”Baseball has a peculiar problem. Baseball is simultaneously selling a sport that you are watching and a history of the sport.”


”Baseball is never going to be the National Pastime again…Nobody would invent baseball today. It’s far too elegant for our brutalist age.”


I’m past sixty, became a baseball fan in the early 1970s (baseball’s single greatest decade from my perspective) and learned to understand the game off the back of baseball cards. I’m not one of those “get off my lawn!” grumpy old guys who just curses at the idea of analytics in baseball, but I do feel like a dinosaur because the stats that formed my baseball knowledge as a kid (RBIs, batting average, pitcher’s wins, etc.) are no longer valued, and despite attempts at educating myself, I still haven’t mastered a full working understanding of todays analytic stats (OPS, WAR, wOBA, FIP, etc.). On top of that, I’m a lifetime Pittsburgh Pirates fan (only four winning seasons in the last thirty-three years) and a dad to adult sons who are completely disinterested in baseball.

If your baseball story has similarities to mine, you are likely the intended audience for this book. You still love the game, but you are not entirely comfortable with many of the ways it has changed in the last couple of decades, you are worried that young people no longer seem interested in the game, and you suspect that your small market team may have become permanently relegated to a second tier that can never really compete with the insanely wealthy teams. You may even worry that, as a baseball fan, you may soon qualify as an endangered species.

Jane Leavy (who is still upset that her dad left her home when he took her older sister to the final Dodgers game at Ebbets Field when she was five) is also a lifelong baseball fan who is concerned about the state of today’s game, and has some definite opinions on what sort of things need to be done to fix it. In Make Me Commissioner she talks to a plethora of baseball people — executives, coaches, managers, stadium designers, scouts, fans, ushers, players at all levels, to get a sense of exactly how the game has changed (both for good and ill) what has gone wrong, what has been lost sight of, and what should be done to ensure that the sport continues to thrive. She talks to the famous, like Spaceman Bill Lee, Dusty Baker, Jim Palmer, and George Brett. But she also sought out people like Phil Coyne, an usher with the Pittsburgh Pirates for 81 years who worked over 6000 games.

While there is far more of identifying problems than practical solutions to fix them here, the book exudes a true passion for the game. Though that passion is mixed with melancholy and a sense of loss, it still exhibits a fierce love of the game. If you are an aging fan of the game who still loves it even though your relationship with it may have soured, this is a perfect book for you. Consider it therapy.

[Jane Leavy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jan. 31, 2021 was when I did my first interview. June 4 is when I sent in the acknowledgments, all the folks who hung with me throughout the process. I hope you'll agree with Dodger manager Dave Roberts when I told him, "when I'm in charge, they'll be dance floors and day care in every major league ballpark and kids age 10 and younger will get in free" and he said, "y'know, you should be commissioner." I hope you'll agree. jl

[Nooilforpacifists · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jane Leavy knows her baseball. But, since her days as a Washington Post sportswriter, she’s made Jane Leavy part of the story. In her first, fantastic, biography, this made perfect sense: Koufax, like Jane, is Jewish, and her understanding of Jewish tradition and the impact on American Jews of Koufax refusing to pitch in the 1965 World Series on Yom Kippur was valuable. The subject of next (very good) bio, Mickey Mantle, vaguely tried to pick her up, and wound up falling dead drunk in her lap in the Atlantic City bar of the casino where the Mick was a Greeter—Jane involuntarily became part of Mantle’s skirt chasing, alcoholic story.

Not only is this book not a biography, its title is misleading as well. Oh, there is a unifying theme: rule changes over 55 years attempting to make baseball better [check that] more commercial. Yet the book actually is a series of loosely interconnected short non-fiction chapters as she goes from town-to-town talking with the players and managers with whom she became friends, plus Dan Okrent, Bill James, and an MIT statistics Prof.

So, if it’s money you have, and vignettes seek, this book is a pleasant diversion:


Former Braves Pitching Coach Leo Mazzone: “One year after he retired, Greg Maddux asked if he could talk to our young pitchers in spring training. He said, ‘You know why I’m a millionaire? Because I can put my fastball where I want to. You know why I got beachfront property in LA? Because I can change speeds.’ End of conversation.” (The author adds: “Today, they’d laugh at him.” Curiously, she doesn’t explain that sentence, but I’d imagine it’s a combination of the fact that no one else could pitch exactly where he wanted with Maddox’s consistency, and today’s Maddox’s fastball (which never topped 93 mph) probably wouldn’t get him a major league contract.)


“Baseball lives at the intersection of history, memory, and nostalgia.”


For that reason, Jane dislikes the Sabermetrics made public in Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball.” She quotes ex-Washington National Ryan Zimmerman: “Try telling [players] you need a sacrifice fly. ‘Oh, no, man. That doesn’t go to OPS [On Base+Slugging]. I gotta get paid.’ Makes it hard to teach.” (Jane elsewhere mentions Bill James, and Orioles manager Earl Weaver (who she adored), like Lewis, hated wasting outs on sacrifices.) Interestingly, however, Jane says Dan Okrent (another close pal) believes the “commodization” of baseball players (in the sense of Scott Hatteberg) wasn’t product of Moneyball but rather Baseball’s 1976 Collective Bargaining Agreement, which codified Free agency. It was that, Okrent said, that allowed him to invent Fantasy Baseball.



Now almost every team has an owner or GM who’s a “numbers guy.” (It’s worth noting the Red Sox didn’t break the “Curse of the Bambino” and win a World Series until numbers geek Theo Epstein was GM.) Yet that appalls Ms Leavy: “Forget the Oriole Way or Cardinals baseball. There’s only one way. The uniformity in baseball exists for the same reason pop songs sound alike and SUVs look the same: an algorithm has determined what works best rhythmically and aerodynamically.…Gone is the drama that made it a joy to write and read about baseball. Now anticipation is a function of execution, not of strategy or tactics. …Author Rebecca Solnit calls [attempting never to be wrong] ‘a stick with which to beat the possible.’ And technology is its cudgel.” [Not sure how Leavy avoided mentioning baseball bats there.]


Predictably, the author hates Robo-umps. She believes mistakes are part of the game. [When they cost you a perfect game, a world series, or any call when Angel Hernandez still was on the field?] A modified system of challenges (which has been used in the minors and spring training for some time will be in service for the 2026 season. Leavy tells a hilarious incident where Jacob Heyward (Jason’s younger brother) was thrown out of an Arizona fall league game by a robo-ump making all calls: “The pitch that caused the ruckus was a curveball that broke down and in on him for strike three. To my eyes, it was a ball. He thought so too, and protested vehemently but not violently. The human ump, the vehicle for delivering a call he didn’t make, took up for the robot and threw Jacob out of the game for arguing balls and strikes. ‘I wasn’t even talking to you,’ Jacob protested.”



Leavy devotes pages to the relatively new “travel leagues,” which apparently have replaced Little League. On the plus side, these travel leagues are well organized and supplied—almost the minor leagues of the minor leagues. Yet, these travel teams are hugely competitive (tough on 13 year olds), and are—not unexpectedly—a new forum for parental fulfillment through their children, and the more wealthy the family, the better equipped, and more funds they have for travel. Jane calls this “pay-to-play childhood…a vast sports industrial complex.” The top levels are crowded not with the best players, but with kids rich enough to travel to the most games. This also, as a general matter, has the effect (though not the intent) of squeezing Black children out of the best travel leagues. This may be why Major League Baseball, once 20% Black, now is more like 5%. The book discusses at length Black travel leagues attempting to right this balance.


Leavy spends chapters with Dusty Baker. He’s a crusty old fellow, who finally retired a few years ago, after about a half century as player and manager (wining at least one in each role that I remember). [Jane probably knew him best from when he managed the Nationals.] People like Dusty are “quote machines,” and Jane elicits some, including when he asked legendary Michigan Football coach Bo Schembechler how to select talent at the marginal (25th man) level. “‘Nuts and guts.’ He says, ‘Dusty, it’s in the fucking face—it’s in the FUCKING face!’ I said, ‘What do you mean it’s in the face?’ He said, ‘You look him in his eyes, and you can see to his soul. You can tell who the bullshitter is. You can tell who’s scared. You could tell who has guts and nuts.’” Baker goes on to explain that this forms the basis for his response to the “‘punk boys upstairs…because all they see is numbers. They can’t even see the soul.’” [Leavy never addresses the rap on Dusty as a manager: that he overused starting pitchers—possibly because starters pitched complete games or at least seven innings when Dusty was a player—thereby shortening their careers.]

In the last two chapters, Jane randomly tosses out some ideas, many of which already are employed, if not mandated. Such as showing OPS along with batting average on the scoreboard. She would mandate wooden bats at every level of baseball—including (somehow) convincing colleges to relinquish aluminum. Jane doesn’t like the pitch clock, but really hates commercials and the fact that batters, but not pitchers, get one time out (each, in different ways, stress pitcher’s arms). Her solution: return to the 75 seconds of commercials between innings (this was the rule until about 20 years ago), add two long six minute breaks after the third and sixth innings—giving viewers a bathroom break—and allow pitchers one “step off the mound” time out per batter. She also would expand the roster to add more pitchers—but only those who had not pitched more than two innings the previous day would be able to pitch on any given day.



Make Me Commissioner would be much better if Ms Leavy set out, say, in an appendix, her proposed baseball rule changes. Absent that, this book is a charming, if scatter-brained stream-of-consciousness of Jane and her baseball pals playing “Clue”: will it be the pitch clock? The commercials? The rosters? The pitchers? Time outs? The bats themselves? Convincing the Major Leagues to standardize, if not fund directly, the travel teams? Jane leaves the proof to the student, which makes this book fun to read, but ultimately unconvincing.

[Samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

A more apt title for this book: Veteran Sportswriter Yells at Cloud, or Late-Career Journalist Anecdote-A-Thon.

Leavy has done her job as a baseball writer well and has written some sports fiction that is worth a read. This, though? Feels like a “here’s what I had leftover that I haven’t been able to use in previous publications.”

There’s a lot of cutesy baseball anecdotes (some charming, some that feel very passé), a lot of name dropping, and a lot of explaining and opining on relatively basic baseball talking points that most of those who follow the sport are already very familiar with. There’s also a lot of Boomer energy going on here which, to be fair, is so very baseball, but also feels a bit off-putting to a significant segment of the sport’s audience, especially those under the age of about 50.

But the real issue here is that there just isn’t anything about this that says Jane Leavy *should* be a candidate for commissioner.

She addresses a lot of frequent talking points favored by fans and journalists and most of the time her perspective is relatable and probably agreeable to where most enthusiasts of the sport would like to see it go.

But she’s not saying anything concrete about *how* to fix the game. Any solutions proposed are the same ones anyone who spends a lot of time watching the game comes up with, so they’re not a demonstration of any kind of expertise in terms of identifying problems, or solving them.

There’s nothing here that offers anything concrete about how to actually fix those problems from the kind of perspective that someone in the commissioner’s role needs to take. In other words, while a fan or writer might agree with these perspectives, a commissioner (who is technically an employee of MLB’s 30 owners) needs to propose the kinds of solutions that might be amenable to those people and thus actually have a fighting chance of being implemented.

Beyond this, I guess I’m just pretty sick of the Get Off My Lawn approach to baseball journalism. Perpetually insisting that there’s something wrong with baseball is a timeworn practice that has existed since the 1800s, but it’s also tired and feels a bit like an excuse to nitpick at a game that is largely very successful and that readers (and the author) clearly love.

This isn’t to suggest that baseball can’t be improved in any way or that I don’t agree with some of Leavy’s ideas on how to do that. But I don’t particularly need another baseball book that is half old timer memories and half list of grievances, especially when the how to fix the game of it all isn’t presented in a manner which is practically applicable.

*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*

[John Schorg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since we all know there's no way in hell the owners of Major League Baseball would ever make Jane Leavy their commissioner - they'll never go down the Bart Giamatti/Fay Vincent road again - this book is best experienced as a lament for what baseball has become.

There are going to be a lot of books of this ilk coming out in the years to come, and Leavy offers up some of the usual suspects: analytics, know it alls in the front office, greedy owners, failing to attract young fans or African American players.

I suppose you could say she offers up some solutions - most of which involve making the experience more fan friendly - but these come across as the kinds of things you'd discuss with folks at a ballgame, rather than serious stuff that owners would consider. And ideas that take money out of owners' pockets... forget it.

But any book by one of the greatest writers of the sport demands your attention, and it helps that Leavy is quite a bit saltier in this accounting than you might expect from her other work. I, for one, applaud it.

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am not the target audience for this book.

[Brandi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am soooo glad that I picked this one up to read for during the offseason. Personally, I am a newer baseball fan (within the last 5 years), but I’ve been to games before that. I am personally a fan of some of the new rules, but I enjoyed this book and the opinions on how to fix baseball.

Also, Leavy is such a good writer. You just get sucked in, plus she’s so funny.

Thank you, Net Galley & Grand Central Publishing for a copy of this ebook!

[Dave Suiter · Rating 5 out of 5]

If MLB ever wanted a commissioner that actually likes baseball, let alone truly loves the game it wouldn’t need to look further than Jane Leavy. Her new book proves exactly what the title suggests - make her commissioner. “Make Me Commissioner” is a witty and inspired look at baseball at every level from the major leagues to Little League, the fantasy leagues and everything in between. Leavy hits her spots like a Hall of Fame pitcher, painting the corners and throwing strikes on every page. The book is so enjoyable as her passion for the game and camaraderie with baseball luminaries shines through.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars for this newish to baseball fan. I loved all the stories of personal conversations, interviews and friendships with some of the great players of the game. It was the parts about baseball's move to all analytics, use of technology over talent and all that is not really baseball anymore that made my eyes glaze over. You can just feel that Jane Leavy is the ultimate lifelong fan of the game.

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leavy is a veteran sports writer who grew up in the middle part of the 20th century and has watched in dismay as baseball has changed to a shadow of its former self. "It's all power now" as one interviewee says, "Power pitching, power hitting." If you can't pitch at 98 mph they won't consider you, and if you can't hit the ball out of the park consistently they don't want you. And analytics drives every decision now, so the average fan in the stands knows what the manager is going to do because the numbers tell him so. (For instance, don't let a starter go through the batting order a third time.) Consequently, a third of at-bats these days end in one of the dreaded Three True Outcomes: A strikeout, a walk, or a home run. Only three guys in the field are engaged for those at-bats. The others are trying not to daydream.

Leavy weaves a meandering tale of questions to various baseball guys about how to change the game for the better, mainly to engage the fans and recruit youngsters (with their famously short attention spans) to become baseball fans, because us old farts are all going to stop going to games when we're all in assisted living facilities.

I said meandering, and it might be called rambling and picaresque. Leavy knows a kazillion guys and namedrops shamelessly. Like most baseball books, there are plenty of war stories and funny anecdotes. A little too much, frankly, that get away from her point.

Want to see her thesis in the nutshell? Skip to around page 338 of the last chapter to see a more-or-less summary of all the ideas that she's floated throughout the book.

Notice that 338 is not the last page, or even close: It's a 384 page book. It's a lot of fun to read if you like random stories about baseball guys you know, and some you don't know, but her central thesis could have been delivered and argued in half the amount.

Want a shorter game? Fine, the pitch clock has helped with that. How about a shorter book?

[Richard Stuhan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Baseball is one of two topics on which I can speak knowledgeably. I have been a Cleveland Indians/Guardians season ticket holder since the current ballpark opened, and I am a licensed professional umpire (It’s not as glamorous as it sounds). I am particularly interested in how the game has evolved and what might be done to make it better. So, when I was gifted Jane Leavy’s “Make Me Commissioner,” I was excited. Leavy is a former sportswriter for the Washington Post and the author of bestselling biographies of Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, and Sandy Koufax. My expectation from the book’s subtitle – “I know what’s wrong with baseball and how to fix it” -- was that the first half of the book would describe the problems plaguing today’s game at the Major League level, while the second half would offer thoughtful solutions to those problems. While the book is fun and interesting and sometimes even incisive, it was not what I expected.

The book is largely a conglomeration of chats that Leavy has had over the years with players, former players, managers, coaches, front office personnel, scouts, team owners, minor league administrators, ballpark architects, analytics geeks, biomechanics gurus, sportswriters, and others associated in some way with baseball. These exchanges are not interviews, but, rather, conversations held under varying circumstances over many years (during a game, at a training facility, in an office, etc.) Leavy’s incessant name-dropping suggested to me that her principal objective was to demonstrate her importance by showing that she has access to people at all levels of the game. Leavy does, to be sure, identify problems with the game as the book progresses, but you have to read between the lines to find them. Leavy also articulates proposals for changing the game. But it isn’t until page 338 of a 365 page book that she does that in any systematic fashion. And it’s never clear which of the change proposals found in the book Leavy has herself embraced

Beyond the book’s failure to measure up to my expectations, it suffers from a lack of organization. The book is written in a style best described as stream of consciousness. The book moves back and forth in time, and it’s frequently unclear when a talk she describes occurred. While the book is divided into chapters, none of them is limited to a single topic. Leavy sometimes begins describing conversations, moves to another point, and then returns to the conversation dozens of pages later. That was particularly frustrating when she was relating a conversation with someone I never heard of. I found myself furiously paging backwards in an effort to remember who that person is. This problem is compounded by the absence of a name or subject matter index. Many of her characters use patois unique to the game. While I appreciated the authenticity, it would have been helpful for her to translate the jargon. Similarly, Leavy alludes to many events which were mysteries to me – even though I am pretty well versed on the game’s history. Most frustrating of all, her sentence structure is sometimes so convoluted that it became incomprehensible. I suppose that I should have expected no more from a former reporter for the Alt Left Post. Now I understand why the Post has decided to dissolve its sports department.

In what’s left of this review, I shall try to do what I hoped the book itself would do -- extract from the book’s meandering stories lessons about what’s wrong with baseball and how to fix them. I then try to organize these kernels of wisdom into a handful of easily digestible propositions. While I do not pretend that I have found everything, I have tried to capture the points that seemed to garner the most attention.

The flaws in the game that Leavy identifies fall into four broad categories. First, compared to other sports, baseball proceeds at a snail’s pace. In an average game, she notes, there are only 17 minutes and 58 seconds in which the ball is in play. The average time between balls put in play is 3 minutes and 52 seconds. In large measure, these periods of inactivity result from a third of all pitches yielding one of the “Three True Outcomes” (i.e., outcomes in which the ball is not put in play and, therefore, generate no action): a strikeout, a walk, or a home run. The prevalence of the Three True Outcomes has increased over time as doubles, triples, and total bases have declined.

Second, baseball’s fan base is old and aging, and changes necessary to attract younger fans risk alienating the old timers. A ballpark architect interviewed for the book observes that baseball fans’ past orientation is reflected in the current vogue for retro-ballparks. Intriguingly, Leavy asks whether baseball would have broken through as an entertainment option if the game had been invented only five years ago. Her answer is probably not. The average MLB fan is measurably older than the average NFL or NBA fan. By and large, people aren’t playing the game themselves any more; the participation rate is in steady decline. Those who follow the game today do so largely because they grew up with it. They are attached to the game being played the way it always was played; they want the statistics and the accomplishments to be comparable from one era to the next. As one of Leavy’s sources puts it, “Baseball has a peculiar problem. [It] is simultaneously selling a sport that you are watching and a history of the sport.” To attract new fans, baseball needs to change; but change risks disaffecting the current diehard fans. So, baseball needs to choose between the future and the past.

Third, analytics have taken the fun out of the game. As one of Leavy’s sources observes, “The drive for efficiency has bled the game of its athleticism and emotion. Everybody thinks the same way, looks the same way, approaches the game in the same way, makes the same decisions with a view toward efficiency and risk aversion.” Another source opines that “the real game is now played on spreadsheets, not on the field.” The job of the manager is no longer to determine when to yank his pitcher or pinch hit; rather, it is to maintain morale. Managers don’t rely on instincts and experience to make decisions but, instead, do what the data tell them to do. The new matrices have devalued practices that keep the ball in play – like bunts, singles, and sacrifice flies. In place of a few key statistics that are easy to understand – like batting average, runs scored, and RBIs – fans now are deluged with a plethora of mostly incomprehensible measures of success, such as Player Win Average, Clutch Hitting Index, Win Shares, Linear Weights, WARP, VORP, MLEs, Brock 2, TPR, TPI, DZR, UZR, and xwOBA (Expected Weighted On Base Average). I have seen this myself at the ballpark, where I can’t find a player’s batting average on the scoreboard, but the team provides the vertical drop and horizontal break for every pitch. I am curious to know how often someone at a game turns to his neighbor and asks, “Hey, Bucko, did you catch the horizontal break on that last pitch?”

Fourth, the drive to achieve the new metric s has resulted in an unprecedented level of injuries – especially to pitchers -- thereby depriving fans for long stretches of the players they would most like to see. The expectation today is that pitchers will throw as hard as they can on every pitch and use a variety of “designer pitches” that strain their arms. A coach for the Tampa Bay Rays was quoted as telling a crop of pitching prospects, “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to come in and you’re going to throw the f__king ball as hard as you can. And when you break, we’ll get someone else.” Admonitions like that have had their intended effect. Since the turn of the century, the average fastball speed has increased from 89 mph to 94.2 mph; the rate of pitches over 95 mph has more than doubled; and in 2024 there were 2,783 pitches thrown over 100 mph. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that injuries have become the norm. By the end of the 2024 season, 2,547 pitchers had Tommy John surgery – nearly 40% of all pitchers in the Major League and Minor League systems. Perversely, the availability of a multiplicity of surgical options and the normalcy of the procedures have encouraged pitchers to take chances; they reason that, if they sustain an injury, surgery can fix it and, while they recover, they will continue to get paid.

So, now that she has identified the problems, how does Leavy propose fixing them – as the book’s subtitle promises? Leavy suggests – half seriously and half in jest – that Major League Baseball should become more like the Savannah Bananas, who get a lot of attention in the book. For the uninitiated, the Savannah Bananas are an exhibition barnstorming baseball team that plays a variation of baseball known as “banana ball,” which emphasizes showmanship, fan participation, and quick–paced games. In banana ball, there is a strict two-hour time limit. No mound visits are permitted and batters are not allowed to step outside the box. There are no bunts or walks. If a batter draws four balls, he engages in the “ball four sprint”; instead of walking to first, the batter can attempt to advance to as many bases as possible, while every position player must field the ball before the batter can be tagged out. Balls caught by fans are counted as outs. There is lots of in-game entertainment, including line dances and pep bands.

While Leavy admires the Bananas, I think she realizes that adopting that model is not the solution to baseball’s problems. In essence, the Bananas are a circus act – the baseball equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters. They are entertaining in small doses, but would lose their appeal over the course of an entire season. Thus, Leavy is compelled to offer other proposals. Unfortunately, Leavy does not address any of the big picture issues MLB now faces, such as competitive balance, salary cap, a national TV contract, or minimum payroll. All of her suggestions seem more like tweaks than revolutionary ideas. Most of her recommendations address off-field activities, rather than the game itself. Many of her ideas would be firmly resisted by owners because they would increase costs or reduce revenue or by players because they would result in lower compensation; virtually all of these changes would be subject to collective bargaining. But let’s leave practicality aside for the moment. In no particular order, here are Leavy’s proposals:

(1) Teams should increase their engagement with the fans. For example, players could conduct on field clinics, while front office staff could schedule Zoom sessions on the business side of the game. My favorite proposal is that teams should designate one player every game – e.g., a player on the Injured List or a pitcher not scheduled to start for a few days – to serve as a “grandstand rover.” The rover would wander the park and sign autographs as requested. Alternatively, teams could designate one player to sign post-game autographs.

(2) Attendance should be more affordable. While teams already offer discounted tickets, Leavy thinks that they can do more. For example, clubs might offer free tickets to kids under 10 or designate one section in the park where fans could not only see the game, but have all they can eat for a modest fee – say, $25.

` (3) Ballparks should be less sterile and more fan friendly. While it seems a bit fruffy to me, Leavy suggests creating an area where fans can sit at café tables with umbrellas. She cites a ballpark architect who proposes putting play areas in spaces where parents can see the game; shoving them into a corner (as is now the practice), she argues, seems to penalize parents for bringing their kids to the game.

(4) All weekend games should be played in daytime, and no game should ever start after 6:30. Leavy recommends starting weekend games around 4:00 to avoid the mid-day heat. She believes that fans should be able to attend games without having to stay out until midnight.

(5) Teams should make it easier to find games on TV. In the old days, all games were on one channel. Now, on any given day, the telecast might be found on a local station, Fox, ESPN, Fubo, Hulu, Sling, Apple TV+, MLB-TV, or other outlets. Fans give up in frustration when they can’t find a game. How exactly teams could make it easier to navigate this bewildering array of outlets is not, however, described. A related point – my own, not Leavy’s – is to make games available on TV at a reasonable price. Subscribing to all the services required to see all games would cost the consumer hundreds of dollars each month.

(6) Equip fans to deal with the new analytics. Teams might consider scheduling workshops or Zoom sessions on understanding the new metrics. Indeed, Leavy suggests working baseball analytics into school math curricula – although how MLB could make that happen is difficult to see. She also touts software that enables users to work with the analytics at a game. There is an experimental program called “Beat the Bot” which allows fans at the ballpark to compete with the data in predicting the outcome of each at bat. Finally, Leavy suggests that teams provide traditional statistics as well as advanced metrics. For example, there is no reason why Jumbotrons cannot display both OPS and batting average.

(7) Put more balls in play. A truly wacky idea is to erect 18’ walls all around the stadium. Think Fenway’s Green Monster extended. The walls could be made of plexiglass, as in hockey arenas. High walls would drastically reduce the number of home runs, leading to a corresponding increase in doubles and triples – hits that involve more players and extend the action. While seeing a ball clear the fence is exciting for a few seconds, there is nothing exciting about watching a hitter trot around the bases. Perhaps baseball can do something even more radical by pushing back the mound to give hitters a little more time to react.

(8) Limit teams to playing two outfielders. Modern outfielders are like gazelles and can chase down most fly balls. Leavy’s proposal would open more space and lead to more base hits, thereby creating more action time.

(9) Look for additional ways to speed up play. Part of the Savannah Bananas’ attraction is that there is almost no down time and the games end quickly. The new MLB speed-up rules – pitch clock, limits on pick-off moves, restrictions on batters leaving the box – have helped, but there is more that can be done. For example, the rules might forbid removing a pitcher unless and until he has been charged with at least one run. I would add limiting relievers to one warm-up pitch; they have thrown a bunch of pitches in the bullpen and don’t need to throw 8 more pitches from the mound.

(10) Do more to protect pitchers. In contrast to some of the other proposals, some of the ideas Leavy articulates are truly radical. She proposes: (a) return to a 154 game schedule; (b) make Monday a firm off day (to allow more time for arms to recover). Mondays already are frequently travel days on which no games are played. But Leavy would make suspension of play on Mondays mandatory; (c) no player would be allowed to pitch two days in a row (a limitation on relievers); (d) any pitcher who threw 6 innings or surrendered 4 or more runs would not be eligible to pitch again for 5 days (a limitation on starters); (e) create a “taxi squad” for pitchers so that they can move off the roster when they need rest (to be replaced by another pitcher on the squad) and on again when they are ready; and (f) prohibit pitches of more than 95 mph. Any faster pitch would automatically be a ball, unless the batter elects to take the result of the pitch. (As an aside, Leavy believes the problem of abusing pitchers begins in youth baseball, and she proposes limitations on traveling teams and youth showcases.)

(11) Make the baseball season more meaningful. In the NFL, teams play only 17 regular season games, making every one of them meaningful. With a 162 game season, no baseball game seems important at the time it is played. (That perception, of course, changes at the end of the season when teams are fighting for titles, but that is beside the point.) Reducing the number of games played is the obvious solution. One expert cited in the book proposes starting the regular season on Memorial Day and ending on Labor Day. Of course, owners and players would never agree to that. An alternative proposal is making regular season performance more meaningful by ascribing more importance to it in the postseason. MLB already has moved in that direction by scheduling all three games at the field of the higher seeded team in the first round. Leavy would go further. In a five game series, she would declare the higher seeded team the winner if it won 2 games, while requiring the lower seeded team to win 3.

(12) Reach out to groups currently under-represented among baseball fans. African-Americans are the obvious target group. Leavy believes that attracting more African American fans would have a spillover effect because blacks are “cool and fashionable.” Currently, they comprise only 6% of all MLB players – a steep decline from the 19% representation they had in 1991. With few role models at the Major League level, few African American kids play the game in high school (that’s consistent with my observation as an umpire), watch it on TV, or attend games. Leavy suggests that MLB make more of an effort to interest black youths in the games – like the Guardians’ RBI (Returning Baseball to the Inner City) program. There likely are other groups with untapped potential. Perhaps MLB should follow the NFL’s lead and secure performers like Bad Bunny to play the national anthem at baseball games.

The bottom line question for any reviewer is whether a book is worth reading. The answer here, I believe, is that it depends. If you’re looking for baseball yarns, this is a good choice. There are interesting stories about the evolution of analytics and how the new data have affected player development. But if you’re looking for insights on “what’s wrong with baseball and how to fix it,” you’re likely to be disappointed. Those insights are there, but you need to fish for them; they could have been presented more clearly and succinctly, and the ideas could have been more fully developed. Some might argue that the reader needs to hear the stories to understand the problems and solutions, but I don't think so. And BTW, the other topic is jury selection.

[Coop Lipski · Rating 5 out of 5]

I call myself an atheist. If God exists, why would he choose to torment my Milwaukee Brewers? There are curses and hexes cast upon ball clubs. Superstitions liter fandoms thinking “if I wear my lucky socks, maybe Brice Turang will get a hit.” If God is real, why must I be the catalyst for a players performance 500 miles away? Shouldn’t that be his job? Am I God? If I am, than this is my bible and Jane Leavy is a disciple.

Baseball is the most human game of all. It’s a game that relishes failure as much as celebrates success. In basketball, you can’t afford to miss a shot. In football, you can’t afford a couple of bad passes. But in baseball, a man can go 0-3 with three strikeouts but hit the walk off home run in the 9th, and become the hero for a night. They didn’t need to be the best, they just needed to be in one at bat when it mattered most. You can say that goes for any sport, but no sport dances in this light like baseball does. It relies on pathos and ethos more than it needs numbers. A child attending his first game wont remember a 1-4 batting line, but the hit that made a stadium of 40,000 rise in unison and create a noise that kid has never experienced before. It’s a game of pathos and ethos, and sometimes sets logos aside.

Baseball is at a crossroads, with logos starting to appear at the forefront of the modern game. Leavy details in her book that it is an archaic sport, lost in time, divided between the nostalgia of the game people grew up with and the path that it’s heading into this world of advanced numbers and analytics. She asks “is the game losing its feel?” And “how do we ensure it doesn’t.” It’s a riveting dissection of baseball from the eyes of someone who genuinely cares about the Great American Game. Baseball isn’t broken or dying. Analytics aren’t ruining the game and old school fans aren’t burdens on the sport. It needs to understand how to use analytics in a way that keeps its feel and right now, it doesn’t know how. Baseball has an identity crisis, and Leavy details and tries to resolve this crisis in this book.

I wish I was God because after 365 pages, I would make Jane Leavy the next commissioner of baseball.

[David Tice · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m a sports fan and a moderate baseball fan. I can’t put my finger on why, but this book was a very hard slog to get through. The writing was ok, and the stories I would usually find of interest, but at a third of the way through I just wanted it to be over.

My biggest specific complaint is, despite the title, Leavy’s ideas if she was commissioner are nowhere summarized and clearly presented. They are mostly scattered through the book and presented as “maybes” or applying someone else’s ideas. I think that was a big alert of my impatience with the book - I was waiting for a grand finale of a “Day One manifesto” and got a rushed damp squib.

To be fair, Leavy highlights many of the faults of today’s game (at least what 60-something me and my equally elderly baseball friends think are faults), what precipitated them, and what are some possible solutions. But like a baseball game, these insights came as brief spurts in the middle of long runs of less interesting anecdotes. Maybe Leavy or her editor should have instituted the equivalent of a pitch clock to keep the narrative moving along.

Recommended only for avid baseball fans.

[Mike Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Make Me Commissioner is an in depth look at the current state of baseball. Jane Leavy travels across the country to explore where America’s pastime stands today, speaking with a wide range of people along the way. She interviews so called “stat geeks,” longtime baseball veterans, college and minor league personnel, those involved in youth sports, and even figures connected to the Savannah Bananas. Through these conversations, Leavy gathers perspectives from every corner of the game.

Leavy then outlines what she would do if she were the Commissioner of Baseball in order to address the issues facing the sport today. I found the book to be a very interesting and thorough examination of modern baseball. Leavy does an excellent job of looking at all aspects of the game and leaves very few stones unturned. The amount of information she provides is impressive, and many of her proposed solutions are thought provoking.

My only real disappointment with the book was its layout and overall flow. At times, Leavy presents solutions immediately after discussing a specific issue, while in other sections she withholds her recommendations until much later. This inconsistency made the book feel somewhat disjointed at times.

That said, I would still recommend Make Me Commissioner. It offers a compelling snapshot of baseball today and presents a number of interesting ideas on how the game could be improved moving forward.

[Rachel Zhao · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars - I simply love baseball and loved hearing stories from other people who play and love the game. There was just enough nostalgia in the book to keep me hooked but I did feel like the author inserted herself into some of the stories too often. But overall enjoyed and I can’t wait for opening day!!!

[Colin Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some great baseball stories. And a thorough and compelling examination of so many of the problems in the game. Make her commissioner!

[Leslie Prétot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another baseball masterpiece by Jane Leavy. Especially the audiobook read by the author. I could listen to her talk baseball all day everyday.

[Randy Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leavy’s latest demonstrates the masterful execution of a perfectly turned 6-4-3 double play. I’m impressed both as a lifelong baseball fan and a career journalist. As to the former, she argues unflaggingly for the beauty of the game itself as well as for us fans, looking beyond ever-skyrocketing superstar contracts and ballpark admission prices, owner paydays and the dominance of inhuman analytics that have come to dominate the conversation. As to the latter, as a career journalist, I marvel at the depth of her reporting and mind-blowing fact-finding as well as her skill at keepingnthis compelling narrative ever moving forward. She’s often laugh-out-loud funny, makes no bones about her own lifelong obsession with the game and draws tremendous insights from a stellar cadre of interview subjects. Finally, as for the book's provocative title, she’s unquestionably got my vote.

[Joyce B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book will probably only be appreciated by true baseball fans! It is easy to read and is written in a style that seems like Ms Leavy is having a conversation with you. I like that she includes information from early baseball mostly from the last 50 years. I also like that she includes a fair amount of commentary on baseball from the last few years right up to the early part of 2025. I have a better understanding of how recent rules in the game came about. I also have a better appreciation of some of the baseball greats from the past twenty years. I learned so much more about the Savannah Bananas that I am sorry I missed my chance to see them at Nats Park this year. Hopefully I will get another chance.

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jane Leavy writes entertaining baseball. Her knowledge of the game, both new and old, takes any reader to a suspended, humorous time warp that is so refreshing. She knows the game, the players, the good, bad, and ugly that makes her writing a pure joy.

"Space Man" Lee, Dusty, "Cakes" Palmer, Ron Washington, Buck Showalter, "Boychek" Bregman, Rich "Middlefinger" Hill and so many others from OK to Cape Cod fills her work with one passionate feeling, "Yep! She must be way ahead of the pack to become MLB Commissioner!

[Attilio Tribuzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Jane’s writing style, she makes me feel like I’m along for the ride in this all-over-the-place dissection of professional baseball and what can be done to save it from itself. If you like baseball and good writing, you will find this book very hard to put down.

[Steve Peifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

My mother would had called the author a tough old broad, and meant it as a compliment. My father would have called her spunky, also a compliment.

I would say she is an elegant writer with a white hot burning love for baseball, and also funny as hell.

To love baseball is to uncomfortably embrace contradictions. The author bemoans the damage done to pitcher’s arm through overthrowing and is enraged when you pull a pitcher with a no hitter in the 7th inning to protect the arm. To love baseball is to somehow have both make sense.

She sees the damage and worth analytics have brought to baseball, and her proposals to move forward have some merit. To be fair, if you invited three true baseball fans to dinner to discuss her plans when she becomes commissioner, it would be a five hour dinner and the most fun meal of the year.

If you love baseball, it’s the book of the year. If you’re a casual fan and love good writing, you are in for a treat.

As a life long Cubs fan, I was outraged when they brought night games to Wrigley Field. Guess what? I love night games at Wrigley Field. The love of tradition and the need to move forward is the tension that baseball embodies and this author gets it.

It’s such a great book.

[George Hamblen · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s rare to find a book as timely and up to date as this one. It’s no secret Major League Baseball has been been falling in popularity. But where have the solutions been? Jane goes into great detail to lay out the root cause and offer solutions. Baseball is at an inflection point and it’s time to plot a new course. If MLB is listening, take these ideas in and consider Jane as commish. Must read for any baseball fan

[Sue Goldberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've loved baseball for 70 years. The words uttered by James Earl Jones, as Terrence Mann, in Field of Dreams have always been entirely believable to me. But... runaway contracts for players who flit from team to team like butterflies pollinating the garden, absurd rule changes in the past few years, statistics-driven gambling (with or without partnerships with major league clubs), well - - I long for the days of complete-game-pitching and oled-timey fun at the ballpark. This wonderful, funny, frank book by Jane Leavy is filled with sage advice from players and managers of yore. Chock full of both statistics and good ideas, humor and athletic surgical details, remembrances of the Baseball that young people once loved to play AND watch, this

[Jami · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating read. You got my vote, Jane!

[Josh McMullen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Extremely disappointing and infuriating

What I expected: a book about how to make baseball better and more entertaining.
What I got: barely a third of the way through the book. The first hundred pages are whining about HOW THE GAME WAS BETTER BEFORE THESE ANALYTICS NERDS GOT TO IT. The second hundred pages started with whining about how the Savannah Bananas are ruining baseball. I didn't get to the third hundred. Presumably, Leavy gets Abe Simpson to yell at a cloud.

Extremely disappointing. Absolute waste of 15 dollars.

[Chris Jaffe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I went into this half-expecting to hate-read it. Much of what I'd heard made it sound like a baseball example of "old person yells at cloud." And, at times, yeah this book does read like that. But it isn't fair to call the entire book that.

Leavy is a huge baseball fan with a lot of genuine passion for the game, and what unfolds isn't just her own views but the result of her talking to tons of people and having lots of encounters in and around the world of baseball. She attends a Savannah Bananas game with Bill James, and goes to Driveline and has tons of talks with Bill "Spaceman" Lee and talks with fantasy baseball founder Dan Okrent and talks to Janet Marie Smith who is central to modern baseparks, to managers Buck Showalter, Dusty Baker, and Ron Washington -and many, many more.

Actually, the book has trouble living up to the hook of its title. The first 90% doesn't read like a manifesto of what's wrong with baseball and how to fix it. The overwhelming majority is Leavy going around to various places and talking to various peoples about the problems of baseball. At the end she directly offers up her solutions, but it feels tacked on instead of the point of the book. Sure, in that opening 90% Leavy's opinions ain't exactly state secrets, but it feels more descriptive.

Sometimes, Leavy offers opinions very much not "old person yells at cloud." She is a big backer of bat flips and players having fun on the field like that. She loves the Savannah Bananas, and thinks baseball can learn a lot from them. (To be clear, she doesn't think MLB should replicate their actions, but instead replicate how the Top Banana thinks, and focus on fans and fun over all else).

More than a few times, she makes really good points. For example, she notes the increasing dominance of travel ball and the privitization of youth sports. Parents spend $40 BILLION a year on it, and it's becoming increasingly unlikely for a person to make the first round in the MLB draft without going through it -- but only 1/400 Perfect Game kids make it to MLB. There are reasonable concerns about all the focus on extreme MPH and Stuff with pitchers is shredding the arms of an entire generation. There is an especially valid point that the rise of analytics has led to a boring style of play with too few balls in play and too many Three True Outcomes. Bill James emails her noting that a real problem with modern sabermetrics is too much focusing on how to advance a highly specific outcomes by 0.3% and not enough about how to create situations that allow for a more enjoyable game.

But, yeah, at times she totally comes off like old person yelling at clouds. For example, while she makes plenty of good points about the negative impact of analystics, she also just asserts points against them without really making her case beyond those assertions. For instance, she argues that modern stats hurt baseball storytelling. Er - how? Well, I guess because we no longer use the stats we used back in nineteen-dickity-three when she was growing up in New York when people wore onions on their belt (as was the style at the time). She bemoans how we don't have specific pitcher-vs.-pitcher matchups like we did in the 1950s (lady, that ship has so long since sailed) or as many as batter vs. pitcher matchup (ma'am, that isn't caused by analytics. That's caused by expansion. Please note she never opposes interleague play, even the modern notion of every team plays every other team each season). There are plenty of other examples of her sounding like she's trying to be annoyed at things, or annoyed that stuff isn't like what it once was way back when.

Also, the writing is surprisingly sloppy. For example, the first sentence of Chapter 3 introduces us to the town of Titusville, Washington where Driveline is located. Then spends the rest of the chapter telling us about Kent, not Titsuvillle. I wasn't sure what to make of it -- is Titusville in Kent County, maybe? Nope. There is no Kent County. There is a town called Kent in Washington - but no town called Titusville. She just wrote down a completely wrong/fictional town name. Typos happen, but that ain't a typo - that's a mental hallucination. There are also some weird typos, like when she talks about ESPN's "$550,000 million contract" with MLB. (Not $550 million, but $550,000 million. Impressive). I chuckled at the acknowledgements section noting "Rob Never." Ah well. Sorry Mr. Neyer.

One more thing to add: when addresssing the problems of baseball, I don't think her aim is very good. We're almost certainly headed to an owner-led lockout in a year, and she barely notes it. The commissioner routinely comes off like the manager of a hedge fund, and has all the ensuing passion for the game one would expect. She notes him a little bit, but is far more upset over modern analytics than she is of Manfred or owner greed. Legalized gambling has unleashed a Pandora's Box of problems, but she again just gives that less notice than she does of the demise of batting average.

It isn't necessarily a bad book, but it can be annoying and forgets its official premise/hook for far too long.

P.S. An index sure would've helped.

[Bookreporter.com Biography & Memoir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back around the turn of the century --- especially in the wake of the 1994 strike that resulted in the cancellation of the remainder of the season --- several former baseball players and pundits published books on the problems with the game. Among them were a dwindling fan base due in part to competition from other diversions and starting times for games that were too late for the younger crowd, as well as feelings that the games were just too long.

As a result of the pandemic, Major League Baseball instituted new rules, including a pitch clock, to speed things up. This destroyed one of the cherished notions about the national pastime: without the clock in all other major sports, baseball theoretically could go on forever.

Even with these rules in place, baseball still has issues. Jane Leavy, who has written seminal biographies of three of the sport’s legends --- Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle and Sandy Koufax --- brings her considerable knowledge and opinions in offering her take in MAKE ME COMMISSIONER.

So what is wrong with the game?

How much time do you have?

For one thing, Leavy believes there’s too much energy spent on numbers: “Playing for numbers has changed the way the game is taught.” Sure, statistics are a major part of the joys of baseball, but the newfound significance of such things as revolutions per minute for pitchers and bat velocity and launch angle for batters is taking over on every level, from Little League to the pro ranks. Teams and players are becoming slaves to the machine, as they look for any little advantage they can find. Trying to combat these new analytics is reminiscent of the scene from the film Moneyball where a group of grizzled scouts who have been working a certain way for decades are suddenly faced with a new way of doing things. But “[p]eople don’t come to see velo,” Leavy writes, “They come to see a story.”

And how the story has changed. When you consider a player for the Hall of Fame, you can’t use the same standards as just a decade or so ago. Starting pitchers throw fewer innings than ever before with a consequent reduction in wins. Where it used to be that you once needed at least 250 wins to be considered Hall material, that bar is now too high. Conversely, 500 home runs used to be a standard for hitters; now it almost seems low.

Leavy writes, “The problem is not having the information. It’s deciding what’s important,” and “Sometimes, it seems the players exist just to generate more data.” She also chastises MLB in the form of Commissioner Rob Manfred for gutting the minor leagues when he decided to cut more than 40 teams. Wouldn’t you think that’s counterproductive when you’re trying to increase interest?

Leavy traveled the country, meeting with former players and executives, and getting their opinions. Some of her ideas are worthy of further consideration, such as starting games earlier; free admission for younger kids, as well as reduced rates for families; making players more accessible by naming a “designated autograph signer” for each game; and monitoring youth baseball to prevent injuries. Others, with all due respect, seem silly, like having just two outfielders and doing away with over-the-fence home runs (granted, these aren’t all the author’s ideas; some come from people she’s interviewed along the way).

Leavy is of my generation, and I give her props for having an open mind. I totally agree with her sentiment that “Too much technology takes away from the beauty of the game.” I guess I fall into the demographic that likes the game as it’s always been, to be able to enjoy an afternoon in the sun without looking at the clock. But I don’t seem to count any more. For me, as she puts it, “Baseball lives at the intersection of history, memory, and nostalgia.” Nowadays, though, it seems the intersection has moved to somewhere between going to the mall, with its myriad food options and shops, and the Banana Ball phenomenon with its dances and bizarre rules, which some find entertaining. It may be entertaining, but to me that’s not baseball.

Reviewed by Ron Kaplan

[Diana Antilles · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first saw this book on the shelves of the Soho location of McNally Jackson I did a double take because for a second, I thought I had somehow time traveled. This book (and this title specifically) covers exactly the topic that anyone who has known me since approximately 2020/2021 has heard me yap about at length, namely baseball and my many issues with its current form. While there are fewer real solutions in the book itself than one might expect from the title—much of the real estate of the book, and indeed its chaptered format, consist of a series of anecdotes collected by the author throughout her years as a sportswriter speaking with various members of the baseball community, from players to general managers to sabermetricians to ushers and everyone in between—I found myself vigorously agreeing with many of her points.

To me, the foundation of the many ills that plague modern baseball stem from the over-reliance on analytics. Baseball at its core is a game, is poetry in motion, is a concert and a duel and a dance amongst two teams nearly every day of the week on a little over 2.5 acres of field from the months of February to November (inclusive of spring training and a long World Series). Even though baseball, and bat-and-ball games in general, has been played in various iterations for centuries, one never knows what one will see at the ballpark, as the saying goes. So to take away that human element, to fractionate baseball into algorithms and numbers and assign a monetary value to a player and try to game out the game without letting it play out on the field takes something fundamentally away from baseball. Yes, baseball is and has always been a business and data and analytics aren’t inherently bad. But the way they are being weaponized to private equitize baseball is an alarming trend, one that isn’t unique to baseball itself. And this has only gotten worse with the endorsement of sports gambling by the league itself. Many people ask me, when they first hear that I love baseball, if I sports gamble. Absolutely not. Players already struggle enough to have ownership and management see them and care about them as humans, and I would never want to partake in something that exacerbates that gap.

I can’t even accused of being an incalcitrant old head, either. As anyone who knew me pre-2021 knows, I didn’t used to be like this. I'm the uncommon adult convert to the church of baseball who didn't grow up with the game or have any real exposure to it aside from the various bits I gleaned growing up in the Bay Area in the 21st century but who has adopted baseball wholeheartedly, sometimes to an incomprehensible degree, in the eyes of my friends. I separate my life into BBE (before baseball era) and ABE (after baseball era), a seismic shift not unlike that of the pre-Statcast and post-Statcast eras. It was refreshing to read a book by someone, especially another woman (lord knows baseball is so male-centric) who (1) didn’t play baseball professionally but (2) loves baseball to the depths of her soul, with every fiber of her being, who sees it as a forever home.

This was a great book to read right as spring training of the 2026 season gets underway. Only time will tell how this season, and the looming specter of the lockout, will fare in the coming months. In the meantime, I am just happy to have survived another long winter and that spring is finally here. Jane Leavy, if you are ever in NYC I would love to grab a beer with you and just gab about baseball.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gack! Having read Leavy's Mantle and Koufax bios, I expected something far better than this dreck.

1.5 stars rounded down.

First, too much Upper East Side Yiddish self-referential schtick. Part of a whole string of self-referential material inserted in the book, including the photo of her bat dog on the back cover.

Second, calling 2016 Chapman a “young fireballer” at age 28 and 7th year in MLB?

Third, per a one-star reviewer, at least by itself, the Cape Cod League did not produce 1,700 big leaguers.

Fourth, yes, Kent, Washington was originally Titusville, but was incorporated AS KENT in 1890. And, this tidbit is totally irrelevant to her story.

At this point, I’m starting to think Jill Lepore on the 1-starred “These Truths.”

Then, looking at reviews, a 3-starrer called this “the ultimate notebook dump.” Bingo. Or a two-starrer noting a good title would be: “Veteran Sportswriter Yells at Cloud, or Late-Career Journalist Anecdote-A-Thon.” Maybe even more bingo.

Then, back to the book. Not sure what “Crawford” she had been talking about, I went to the index.

Oops, there is none, and my followers know that means an automatic ding.

Next, we’re in irony land. She gushes about Spencer Strider, has Dodgers manager Dave Roberts gushing about how he’s a lab rat for the newfangled baseball academies, etc.,on page 78. Strider got Tommy Johned in 2024, well, actually “caged.” She does note that 7 pages later. Why not at 78? Afraid of undercutting Roberts?

Also at this point, I realize that I haven’t yet had a big solution and that smaller solutions are nibbling around the edges, or else impractical or unrealistic. Any pitch over 95 a ball for example? Might cause more arm stress on pitchers before they adjust. Also depends on accuracy of guns in different stadiums.

The idea that the Savannah Bananas have something to teach MLB? Laughable. I mean, Banana Ball is entertainment. It’s not baseball as we know it, starting with that it’s literally not timeless. (Worse, she then flip-flops and rejects their Golden Bat idea.)

Shortening commercials between half-innings? Agreed.

Gets ghost runner rule wrong by talking about 1975 WS when it doesn’t apply to postseason.

Moving right along? By page 225, I’ve yet to see the word “steroids.” I’m not saying that’s anywhere near all of baseball’s problems but roiding did contribute to “three true outcomes.” I’ve also yet to see the word “blackout.” Yes, TV disparity is talked about, but I didn’t see the phrase “regional sports network” either.

I grok more. It gets worse.

Near page 300, she blames Bartman for the Cubs losing the 2003 NLCS. Mark Prior admitted “I choked.” So did the Cubs defense. Above all, did Dusty Baker, darling of Leavy’s throughout the book.

Last chapter offers mini-solutions, most untenable, like the 95mph max pitch speed. Some solutions offered by others, like a ball with more natural tack or higher seams? That will only encourage yet more spin, then more Tjs.

Other than this book being the blather even worse than the 3- and 2-star reviewers above indicate, Leavy getting the ghost runner rule and Bartman wrong show that she’s overrated, and self-overrated, in actually knowing baseball.

She does have one thing in this book. The tip of a Dusty Baker bio, but per blowing it on Bartman, she'd probably make that a puff piece book.

And, the subtitle is mendacious.