To borrow a baseball term of art (okay, a cliché), Jane Leavy is an elite spitballer. No one is better built than Leavy, a crafty veteran sportswriter, for between-innings repartee, wry asides, and tossed-off ideas for improving her beloved sport—and maybe even keeping its ever-looming obsolescence at bay for another decade or three.
Leavy’s suggestions for spicing up baseball reflect the essence of spitballing—a pastime within a pastime. Baseball’s most devoted fans have a long tradition of complaining loudly about what’s wrong with the game and insisting that they’d run it better if given the chance. Surely, they are smarter than any clueless manager or hapless commissioner. They can be insufferable.
But not Leavy, not ever. She has a distinctly kinetic way of making her case, like a rollicking tour guide through a stuffy museum. She also knows there’s only so much that can be done to renovate the tradition, given its creaky foundations. “Baseball is still a nineteenth-century construct, born at a time when pocket watches were in vogue,” Leavy writes in her latest romp through the sport, Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It.
The title made me a bit wary off the bat. While I endorse Leavy as the sport’s next commissioner—because why the hell not?—I’d quibble with the premise that baseball is in need of much “fixing” these days. In recent years, I seem to have fallen back into a good groove with the sport, especially after the major leagues introduced new rules designed to speed up the action. As far as I was concerned, this was long overdue and I welcomed it, though I also realize that an aversion to change runs deep in baseball, and the spirit of debate has been as fundamental to the game as the three-out inning.
I first met Leavy a decade or so ago at some author event in Washington, and we became fast bantering companions—usually on the topic of baseball. She is a five-tool chatterbox who relishes the ample kibitzing time that the game allows for (or, if you prefer, the endless dead time that makes baseball tedious and keeps boring away the next generation of would-be fans).
Like most Leavy appreciators, I first cavorted with her as a reader. As an alum of The Washington Post’s crackerjack sports desk of decades past, she is best known as an ace author, whose trilogy of biographies—of Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, and Babe Ruth—ensure her place in the first division of the baseball chroniclers. She is the rare historian who writes without a speck of pretension, and whose prose reads like she’s typing and shelling pistachios at the same time.
Make Me Commissioner is not Leavy’s typical smorgasbord. For starters, it is not a biography, though the book enlists some of baseball’s most cerebral and unusual characters and philosopher kings. They include current players (Red Sox third baseman Alex Bregman), World Series managers (Dave Roberts, Dusty Baker, Joe Torre), eccentrics (Bill “Spaceman” Lee), stat-heads, innovators, and traditionalists alike.
But the star of this production is Leavy and the game she could never abandon, no matter how much her attention might wander. “Baseball is mine the way my lungs are mine,” she writes of her affliction. She describes the sport’s quirky rites and odd-duck characters as her sanctuary from traditional feminine exercises. “I always got tangled up when I tried to be a proper girl,” Leavy writes.
Yet Make Me Commissioner is anything but an unconditional love letter to the game. It is, in fact, an extended cautionary note, or purpose pitch: Baseball, Leavy warns, should never take its place in American life for granted. This is theoretically something the sport should have internalized decades ago, starting when the NFL lapped Major League Baseball as America’s most popular league. Baseball might be known as the national pastime, but its leaders and practitioners also know full well that much of the country has consigned it to the “National Passed-Time,” as the Washington Nationals first baseman, Josh Bell, calls his vocation.
Leavy sets out on a barnstorming tour of Baseball America in search of prescriptions, engaging dozens of her buddies in extended spitballing sessions about how to make baseball more accessible, better attuned to video-game attention spans, and more inviting to over-circuited brains.
Many of her interviewees land on the same lament: Baseball has a fed-up-audience problem. “Hard to watch,” Hall of Fame player and manager Joe Torre acknowledges during a Cooperstown confab with Leavy and Sandy Koufax. “I don’t watch,” Koufax admits. Leavy catalogs this wistfulness not in the spirit of hand-wringing, but more as an earnest problem solver. “I asked everyone the same questions,” she writes. “What happened? How did baseball lose America? Why doesn’t it move people the way it once did, the way only it can, the way it still moves me? Who now speaks for the game? And what can I do to help?”
One of Leavy’s recurring complaints is that the game has become overloaded with data and analytics. Much of contemporary baseball strategy is now governed by statistical probability, with far less tolerance for good old-fashioned hunches and diminished concern for what she identifies as “the human element.”
Baseball is “unpredictable in a good way,” Torre told Leavy. The numbers experts, he said, are trying to remove as much chance and serendipity from the equation as possible. And yet, this unpredictability is precisely what traditionalists often love about the game. “They’re trying to make an imperfect game perfect,” Torre said of the statisticians. “I resent that.”
As I mentioned before, I’m in a much better place with baseball at the moment than Leavy is. My recent spike in interest will never match my childhood obsession with the game, but I am now paying much closer attention than I did through the majority of my adulthood, when I—like many people—became steadily estranged from the sport. The biggest culprit was its lagging pace of play. Baseball had become interminable. Games were routinely surpassing three or even four hours; players started taking forever to adjust their batting gloves (and other “equipment”); there were endless pitching changes and mound visits, less scoring and less action.
Fans noticed, yawned, and made other plans. MLB’s annual game attendance dropped from 79.5 million in 2007 to 64.5 million in 2022. Finally recognizing the crisis, the league introduced its new rules in 2023 in an effort to heal and revitalize itself. It put in place a host of reforms to speed things along, generate more offense, and essentially liposuction the dead time from its sagging product. The biggest change by far was the introduction of a “pitch clock,” which required that pitchers take no longer than 15 seconds to deliver the ball to home plate. The clock was an instant success: Games moved faster, taking about a half hour less to play nine innings in 2023, the year the changes went into effect, than they had in 2022.
I had a close-in view of baseball’s new rules rollout for a story I wrote in 2023. I interviewed many of the architects of the repairs and came away impressed with how thoughtful and deliberate they were in putting their tweaks into place. But the best gauge of the project’s success was my own reaction: I found myself more locked in to the action almost immediately (and yes, there was more “action,” namely offense, as measured by higher batting averages). I’ve probably watched more MLB games in the past three years than I did in the three decades prior. As far as I was concerned, baseball and I were cool again. And I realized how much I’d missed it and how happy I was to have it back in my life.
Leavy, by contrast, would probably say that she and baseball never broke up to begin with. But she will never be fully satisfied with her partner, and her tinkering remains a campaign in progress.
The best ideas in her book are less in the vein of rule changes than they are in cultural initiatives to repair baseball’s diminished appeal among many demographic groups: kids, for starters. Leavy proposes letting anyone 10 or younger into games for free and mandating postgame autograph sessions with designated players. She also decrees that all weekend games should be played during daylight hours, “except four designated showcase games on Friday and Sunday that MLB can put on all their fucking platforms.”
Make Me Commissioner has some good ideas. But I loved it less as a catalog of clinical prescriptions than as a kind of baseball soapbox, a celebration of storytelling and spitballing in the best oral and literary traditions of the sport. In its hilarious opening scene, set at Baltimore’s Camden Yards in 1995, Leavy describes nearly being decapitated by a foul ball on the night Cal Ripken Jr. broke Lou Gehrig’s record for consecutive games played. “The ball traveled on a fierce diagonal, like a knife cutting a Passover brisket,” Leavy writes. If you’re keeping score, the story ends well: Leavy survives the attack, emerges from the chaos, and goes home with a baseball.
The tale she’s lived to tell emerges, for all its crotchety complaints, from a place of unerring loyalty. Baseball is “the only game that starts at home and ends up at home,” Leavy writes, quoting Bill Lee (the “Spaceman”). “Baseball is my home,” she adds. She hosts a wickedly fun house party.
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