Good morning!
Jane Leavy fell in love with baseball the moment she heard Phil Rizzuto call a Yankees game. Her grandmother’s parlor was “one long foul ball” from the Stadium and a half-hour railroad ride from Shea. Baseball got her through her divorce and the Covid-19 pandemic “when I was actually jealous of the cardboard fans.”
She’s written bestselling biographies of Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax and Babe Ruth, and her latest effort is Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It (Grand Central Publishing, 365 pgs., $32.50).
Unlike her other baseball books, this is a full-on rant about how money, analytics and high tech are ruining America’s pastime, replete with f-bombs and plenty to support her thesis from the game’s icons.
“I hate modern baseball,” Roger Angell told Leavy shortly before his death three years ago at age 101. “The whole nature of the game has changed.”
Indeed, baseball today has been largely reduced to home runs and strikeouts — 40,000 of the latter every season since 2017, and 5,453 of the former in 2024. “Home runs have become so ubiquitous that I barely look up,” writes Leavy.
MLB is aware of its problems. A 62-page in-house report concludes that “the emphasis on velocity and max effort are having a noticeable and detrimental impact on the quality of the game on the field.”
Jim Palmer, who pitched 211 complete games during his Hall of Fame career with the Baltimore Orioles, decries rotations that today are composed of five-inning starters. “These guys will never experience what the great pitchers of the past experienced. Try getting Rice, Yastrzemski and Fisk out with a one-run lead.
“I’ve been told they need their two-and-a-half hours of quiet time. They’re throwing less and they’re babied more. They have their physical wellness and mental wellness. They have hygiene and diet. They have their quiet time.”
Palmer pines for the sort of old-fashioned ballbusting like when Mets pitcher Steve Trachsel and he visited Tom Seaver at his California vineyard, and the first words out of Seaver’s mouth were, “Trachsel throw the f—— ball!”
Seeking to find amends
We’re all complicit in our own way for today’s mess. We wanted more. We wondered what managers said in the dugout and players said on the field, and now we know: they say nothing.
Leavy calls out “Field of Dreams” for its plastic corn stalks and “faux-wood adhesive padding on the outfield walls” and rues the proliferation of travel team baseball. “There’s always a tournament or showcase somewhere, if not sponsored by Perfect Game then by Prep Baseball Report, Prospect Wire, Prospect Select or Area Code Baseball.”
She’s the sort of fan who would appreciate watching an American Legion game played without the frills on a quiet summer evening at Vets Field. At Eldredge Park in Orleans, she describes a batter standing on second base after rapping a bases loaded double and “yanking the corners of the Braves logo, turning it into a bullet bra for the benefit of his titillated teammates, one of the uglier trends in self-pimping I’ve seen lately.”
Oft’ times she’d find her friend Dan Okrent sitting at his favorite spot atop a small slope beyond the centerfield fence. Okrent has written “9 Innings”; “The Ultimate Baseball Book” and “Baseball Anecdotes.” Decades ago he invented Rotisserie League Baseball which begat fantasy league baseball.
Feeling responsible for baseball’s descent into the dystopian world of launch angles and spin rates, he tells Leavy, “We have to figure out what to do that will restore the game to its glory, or even part of its glory.”
Thus began her campaign to become commissioner.
Know thy enemy
Three years ago Leavy drove to Boston to attend the 20th anniversary of Moneyball “to find out why the game I love was leaving such a bad taste in my mouth.”
She hobnobbed with 2,500 analytics groupies who paid $1,000 apiece to be at what she described as a Davos for Big Data — “a regular clusterf—- for the Analytics Industrial Complex.”
A professor of human systems engineering at Arizona State University preaches “expertise-induced amnesia” and “ecological dynamic approach to coaching” all pertaining to baseball, mind you.
“Mookie didn’t like it much,” said the professor. Three cheers for Mookie.
At a small town in Washington she visits a “data-driven performance center called Driveline” where she’s introduced to the Blast Motion Baseball Swing Analyzer and the Edgertronic camera that improves spin rotation and exit velocity.
“They’re a little too much with the technology,” says Seattle infielder J.P. Crawford. “They’ve taken the beauty of the game away from baseball.”
Leavy had seen and heard enough about players like Atlanta pitcher Spencer Strider. “He’s like a studio lab rat, they just kind of made him,” says Dodgers manager Dave Roberts.
Seeking someone who hadn’t succumbed to the analytics pod people, she struck gold when a five-tool player named Chase DeLauter arrived on the Cape from James Madison University.
“Chase DeLauter could only be hatched outside the system in a hollow in West Virginia,” she writes. “This is the kid you root for. The kid who feels about baseball the way lots of American kids, including me, used to feel.”
DeLauter batted .298 in 34 games with the Firebirds, hit nine home runs and had 21 RBIs. Guardians scouts assigned to the Cape Cod League spotted him and Cleveland made him their first pick in the 2022 draft.
He was called up in October, and his first big league at bat came during the playoffs against Detroit.
Jane’s helpful hints
Leavy’s ideas to fix baseball are laudable but mostly whimsical, impractical or naive. She thinks the Savannah Bananas have all the answers, and she is infatuated with Bill Lee.
Anyway, let’s get to it. If Jane Leavy was commissioner all weekend games would be day games, and ghost runners would be banned. “It is inimical to everything that made baseball quintessentially American. No one gave you anything, you had to work your way around the bases.
“What’s more,” Leavy added, “Roger Angell hated it. Anything Roger hated is hateful to me.”
There shall be designated autograph signers at games; kids under 10 get in free; managers must leave starters in for seven innings and can’t make a pitching change until said pitcher allows a run, presumably earned.
Any pitch thrown over 95 mph would be a ball, and the commissioner would introduce a newly invented, technically perfect baseball she claims actually exists that doesn’t let pitchers “max out their elbow stress on max heave.”
There’s more, but let’s wait till current commissioner Rob Manfred’s gone. A lockout’s coming Dec. 1, 2026, and if entrepreneurs start a new league Jane Leavy’s odds-on to be the commissioner. She speaks for all of us when she writes that despite its faults, “Baseball is my home. I will always come back no matter how many times I think I’m done.”