On Saturday night, Oct. 25, my husband managed to pry me away from the second game of the World Series to see a movie at a local funplex. In each of the cavernous bars, there was a massive square of four giant televisions, all tuned to various sports games. Perhaps not surprisingly, in a city dominated by a state university, nearly all were college football games. Not one of them was showing the World Series, which featured the Toronto Blue Jays taking on baseball’s reigning champions, the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Shocked as I was — “It’s the bloody World Series!” I wanted to scream — I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. Long gone are the sellout baseball games of my childhood, when I sat behind the Cincinnati Reds dugout at Riverfront Stadium (RIP) alongside my father with glove, ball and pen in hand, hoping to catch a pop-up foul or snag an autograph.
Although there has been an uptick in recent years, attendance began declining at ballparks around the country in the late 2000s. Television viewership of Major League Baseball games has stagnated. The NFL has become ascendant, with a 2023 Pew Research Center survey finding that, by a wide margin, Americans considered football to be “America’s sport.” For many, the game that was fondly and famously described as “America’s national pastime” began to simply feel more like America’s past, a slow-moving, creaky relic of a bygone era.
Now, in the wake of a thrilling, hard-fought seven game World Series that saw the Dodgers come from behind to defeat the Blue Jays on Saturday night in a game that extended to 11 innings — making them rare back-to-back champions — there’s no better time to contemplate how to turn the tide.
MLB’s data obsession in the “Moneyball” era has stymied the game and served to alienate its fanbase, with statistics — and strategies derived from them — that are often hard to understand. “Analytics,” Leavy says to a friend at one point in the book, “f**ked baseball.”
In her latest book, “Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It,” veteran sportswriter Jane Leavy acknowledges this quandary. “Baseball is still a nineteenth-century construct,” she writes, “born at a time when pocket watches were still in vogue.” But modern technology, by and large, hasn’t helped. MLB’s data obsession in the “Moneyball” era has stymied the game and served to alienate its fanbase, with statistics — and strategies derived from them — that are often hard to understand. “Analytics,” Leavy says to a friend at one point in the book, “f**ked baseball.”
Still, she writes movingly, “Baseball is mine the way my lungs are mine.” Equal parts love letter, manifesto, memoir and travelogue, “Make Me Commissioner” is a literary home run, as well as a heartfelt, occasionally acidic plea to save the game she and millions of others still love.
The author of critically acclaimed and bestselling biographies of baseball greats, including Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth and Sandy Koufax, Leavy’s campaign for the position of commissioner — which is currently held by Rob Manfred, who announced he will retire after his term ends in 2029 — is playful, tongue-in-cheek. But baseball would do well to take her candidacy seriously.
Leavy’s passion for the game is infectious, and as a woman, her election would be history-making. Her ideas — her platform — are inspiring and reflect a fans-first approach. Pregame (and on-field) baseball clinics for kids, designated players to sign autographs on behalf of each team, the return of afternoon baseball games, better food options and making the sport more accessible to television viewers are just a few of her proposals. With notable exceptions — such as the recently introduced pitching clock, which she celebrates — Leavy advocates a managerial approach that balances the use of data and analytics with human instincts and gut feelings that have traditionally brought magic to baseball.
Over the course of two days, Leavy and I talked back and forth on video chat, email, text and the phone about the state of baseball. The day after the epic seven-hour, eighteen-inning game three of the series — which tied for the longest game in World Series history — we compared notes about the game and how we powered through. “I didn’t even yawn,” Leavy said. “I just got some popcorn.”
Over email the afternoon before, I had asked her what she still loved about baseball — what, despite the intrusion of analytics, it still manages to get right. She saved her answer for a phone call the next day: “I wrote a book with the title ‘Make Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It.’ [Game three] was everything that’s right with baseball and why it’s important to fix what’s still wrong.”
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What made you first fall in love with baseball?
It was certainly through my dad, but my [maternal] grandmother…lived one loud, long foul ball from [the old] Yankee Stadium — and from the home plate, I should say. And even though the front windows [of her apartment] faced away from the ballpark, I would sit under her grand piano [and] hear the sound of the game bouncing and wafting up the side streets…I could hear bats meeting balls. I could hear the echo of [legendary Yankees announcer] Bob Sheppard’s voice, and mostly, I could hear the roar of the crowd. And I think that was not just the beginning of loving baseball, but it was the beginning of a kind of reportorial curiosity: I want to know. I want it. I was too young to understand that. You know, they weren’t going to let me in the dugout [and I wasn’t] going to be allowed to play. But I wanted to know what was going on.
I love how you described the sounds of the bats and the crowd. It strikes me that so much about baseball, or baseball as it used to be, is about romance. The beauty of a well-executed double play —
The choreography!
The look that Ken Griffey Jr. gave the ball when he knew it was a homer. A pitcher trying to achieve a no-hitter…So much of this book seems to be about the decline of that romance.
I tried to say that without using that particular phrase, because, you know, you lose the guys.
That’s right! [laughs]
The most romantic thing in the book, probably for me, is [when] my friend [MIT Professor Anette] “Peko” Hosoi — I call her a humanist with math skills — said to me, “You know, baseball is the canary in the coal mine.”
You can look out there on that field, and when you see things, you should say to yourself, “What’s going on here is the loss of human control, and it’s not just over baseball.” It’s [connected to] “Why are these ads showing up on my computer screen? Why do I get push tickets for this kind of play? Oh, they saw that I purchased ‘Damn Yankees.’”
[Peko] doesn’t think that most people understand the extent to which our lives are already organized, manipulated —
Predetermined —
Yes, by algorithms…Baseball is a gift to the 21st century if you [have] a problem with the way we have deferred to technology. I find it unreal that the only science that is not questioned these days is data science. How did that happen? The presumption is it’s all good, right? … It’s going to save you money, or it’s going to save you outs, or it’s going to save you runs, scores, whatever it is — it’s “efficient” and it “optimizes.”
That’s one of my least favorite words. I hate that word: “Optimize.”
Isn’t it hard? A professor at Columbia once told my ex-husband that you should never use any word that ends in i-z-e [or i-z-e-d]; they’re just ugly. He was right…But I think that’s the underlying point — literally everywhere I went, I would suddenly hear somebody say, “Ah, but the human element [of baseball].”
Well, the human element doesn’t hold a candle [these days] to the gigabytes and whatever they are…You really have to hold on to the idea that we created this stuff…
I had this moment of synthesis and went, “We’re not an element; we’re the human beings. Everything else is a subset of us, including all the data.”
We should be in control, and we’re not exerting that control. And baseball is where you can see that happening most obviously. [There was that moment] during [the third game of the American League Wild Card Series on Oct. 2] between the Red Sox and the Yankees when [pitcher] Cam Schlittler was…sent out for the eighth inning when everybody assumed that [manager] Aaron Boone had decided, or had been told to decide [by data], that he was done after seven…And there was this roar in the ballpark [and] somebody on ESPN said, “Listen to that — that speaks to the hunger for old-style starting pitches, or for letting the narrative play out.”
You know, those no-hitters and complete games and seeing whether somebody had a pitch in his back pocket, as the cliche goes in baseball, that they could use… That’s the way pitchers used to pitch. And so that moment when Boone sent [Schlittler] back out and there was this roar, [it] was not just for what he had done, but for what he was being allowed to do.
Yeah, we need those narratives. What you just said reminded me of the moment, early on in the book, when you’re having breakfast with [former Yankees manager] Joe Torre and [former Los Angeles Dodgers Hall of Fame pitcher] Sandy Koufax, and Torre says they’re “trying to make an imperfect game perfect” —
“And I resent that.”
Would you say that [was] one of the moments that made you want to write this book?
It was the moment…I’m at this table with these two guys, and they’re explaining what’s wrong with baseball, and…at the end of it, Joe said, “It’s hard to watch.” And Sandy replied, “I don’t watch.”
That’s damning.
You’re right. How is it that I’m the only person who takes my phone and puts it under the tablecloth [at dinner parties] and watches on game day? God bless me, and these guys don’t care. I mean, I think they care, but they don’t care for this game, and they don’t relate to it.
[I went to see the Savannah Bananas, who are packing stadiums, in reporting the book and], as far as I’m concerned, the fat, jiggling dad bods racing around the bases is something I never want to see again. The diapered babies racing down the baseline to mom or dad? I thought that was just fabulous.
The most instructive moment was when one of the Party Animals — those are the pink guys, who were the Bananas’ first foils — crawled into the stands, climbed over the gate [and] this beautiful little boy was just like [Leavy makes an admiring expression], and [the player] hands him a pen and says, “Will you sign my jersey?”
Well, you know, this kid didn’t know he wasn’t a Yankee, or even what he was. He knew he was a ball player, and that was important to him, because in America, nothing is more important than being asked for your signature. And the [Bananas’] assistant coach, Adam Virant, who’s a recovering lawyer, looked at me and he said, “That kid just became a baseball fan.”
Yeah. And as one of those kids who already loved baseball and then played T-ball and little league, I still remember meeting [Cincinnati Reds outfielder] Eric Davis. He was so kind to me and generous, and I remember that.
These were people who acknowledged that part of the obligation of being a player is to be an entertainer, that it’s theater, that you are telling a story, and that you are trying to bring someone into a —
Story, there’s that narrative again —
Exactly, a game or an at-bat or a series. They’re all parts of a larger story that can span a season or multiple seasons or decades, even, if you’re looking at the Yankees and the Dodgers in the 1950s, for example… The problem is that the analytics do not align with the things that are most entertaining.
They don’t align with narrative.
They don’t align with narrative, whereas analytics has made football more exciting, because analytics tells coaches [to] go for it on the fourth down. You know, you don’t have to be conservative; analytics says it’s okay, you know. And analytics created the three-point shot [in basketball].
But as younger sports — as younger institutions, I should say — [football and basketball are] freer, less bound to tradition [and] numbers and doing things the way it had always been done, so that they could institute change, whereas baseball was stuck. They just couldn’t see what my friend Michael Halpert, who’s an economist, explains as path dependence. They just kept doing the same. It worked for 50 years, you know…so at the moment, baseball is not optimized to entertain.
I love the cheeky title of this book: “Make Me Commissioner.” [The book is] so well written. It’s so scene-based, character-driven. It’s provocative, it’s interesting, it’s humorous. To me, this is what a politician’s memoir or campaign launch book — those are so boring now — should be. So with that in mind, could you give me a quick stump speech for why you should be [Major League Baseball’s] commissioner?
That is the best question. [pauses] Because I love it more than they do.
The problem is — and it’s all part of the technology thing — we’ve created so much distance between politicians and voters, between ball players and fans…The estrangement is physical as well as psychological, and [it’s] based on how much money the players make and all that kind of stuff.
The problem is — and it’s all part of the technology thing — we’ve created so much distance between politicians and voters, between ball players and fans…The estrangement is physical as well as psychological, and [it’s] based on how much money the players make and all that kind of stuff. So when [Hall of Fame pitcher] Lee Smith said to me at Cooperstown, “You know, I still have friends that I made while sitting in the bullpen when it was on the field at Wrigley Field.” And he didn’t mean acquaintances. He meant friends. That’s something that baseball needs to think about.
If you want people to care, you have to give them purchase on the game. You need to make it accessible. You’ve got to be able to find it on television. You’ve got to make it [affordable]. You’ve got to be able to bring a kid to a game. And they’ve taken some really good steps; the pitch clock is fabulous…But you know, Jesse Cole [of the Bananas]: Fans-first. Entertainment. Teach people to look for the Jacob Young catch. It’s very instructive, the response to that catch. You know, he goes up [against the wall] to catch the ball and brings [it] back. As he comes down, the ball falls out of his glove and he kicks it back into his glove for the out, right?
What did everybody say the next day? “Oh, that’s a Bananas play.” No, that’s a major league play — when Major League Baseball was about more than home runs, strikeouts and walks.
We talked about how narrative is missing from baseball today with the emphasis on analytics. Who are some of the players you see as bringing narrative to the game? Which players resonate most with you now?
The one that’s really got my attention is [Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu] Yamamoto [who would later be named the World Series’ MVP after an epic relief pitching performance in game seven.] He turned the season around for the Dodgers that weekend in Baltimore by being allowed by [manager] Dave Roberts to go out and find out how good he could be, in the memorable words of [Bill Lee] the Spaceman. And he wasn’t quite good enough. Not that day. [Baltimore Orioles infielder] Jackson Holliday hit the wall — scraper of a home run — and Yamamoto lost the game, lost the no-hitter, and the world didn’t come to an end. You know, what [was] learned was maybe you let somebody go for it…they took off after that loss. They had been really in the doldrums, but to see that guy out there warming up in the bullpen — I mean, that is throwback stuff, man. It’s Koufax running down to the bullpen in the second game of a doubleheader in Philadelphia that the Dodgers had to win in order to make it to the World Series and saying, “I’m available.” That’s the same thing. And then to see [Yamamoto] cleaning up the dugout the other night after pitching a complete game — yeah.
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You asked…“Who are the people who are energizing the game right now?” It’s the Japanese. It’s the immigrants — the immigrants from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela and Mexico and Cuba, who bring ebullience and evident emotion to the game…
People always say to me, “Oh, well, Mickey Mantle ran around the bases with his head down because he didn’t want to embarrass any pitchers.” F**k no. He ran around the bases with his head down so he wouldn’t trip over the bases and make his bad knee even worse. Was he modest? Did he avoid showing people up? Yes. Absolutely. And I don’t think the expression of emotion by players is the same thing as showing somebody up.
That’s right.
There’s things that they do that I really don’t like — you know, beating their chest every time in front of a pitcher. Don’t humiliate a pitcher — and not just ’cause it isn’t nice, because it’s stupid.
Yeah.
It’s gonna come back and get you the next time.
But I think this is where we get back into the thing about the core fan base. It’s still pretty conservative. It’s old, you know? It’s like I always tell people: “My children’s generation and your generation don’t see color the same way, they don’t see gender the same way. They don’t see sexuality the same way.” It’s like, whatever. You are who you are, right? And there’s a core in the baseball audience that is deeply offended by what they perceive as the showboating of the Latin players. Well, some people see it as showboating; I see it as emotion. And as Francisco Lindor said to me [in] what may be the most important thing anybody said in the book, “You gotta be yourself. Cause if you’re not authentic, you’re not gonna be able to play. Be like America: Free.”
