Jane Leavy Fixes Baseball

Jane Leavy knows baseball. And she loves baseball. She’s a former sportswriter and author of best-sellers about Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle. Her new book is Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It. The book mixes history, memoir, personal connections, and insights based on watching innumerable games as a lifetime fan. She writes about the way baseball has been affected by changes in technology, from “moneyball” to television cameras intruding on the playing field, changes in ownership from families to billionaires, even the way stadiums are designed all have affected baseball. And she writes about what it will take to get a new generation of fans to fall in love with the game.

You cite a shocking statistic in the book. Is it really possible that there are only 17 minutes of action in a baseball game?

That was from a TIME magazine article a long time ago. If you compressed down all the time wasted scratching and spitting and walking around to center your thoughts before the next pitch and gather yourself. Because what happened is that the interiority of the 70s and 80s and 90s infiltrated baseball and they kept saying to players, “Now, don’t go up to bat until you’re centered.” Go up to the plate, see the ball, hit the ball! That’s what baseball used to be.