After writing about Koufax, Mantle and Ruth, her new book, ‘Make Me Commissioner,’ describes her rediscovery of the game as well how to fix what’s broken.
Confetti is strewn about the field at Dodger Stadium amid the celebration of the Dodgers’ back-to-back World Series championships on Nov. 3, 2025. It has been, seemingly, a lifetime of benign negligence from the Lords of Baseball that drove author Jane Leavy – biographer of Hall of Famers Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth – to write a how-to book of sorts, aimed at correcting some of what has ailed the national pastime over the years.
Then again, there seemed a lack of potential material currently out there involving more recent generations of baseball stars. “The access that you have with dead guys, it turns out, is a lot better than you have in a modern locker room,” she quipped in a Zoom conversation this week, noting that the process of writing her last book, “The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created,” took eight years before it was published in 2018. “There are great players in Major League Baseball, many of them,” she said. “But what there aren’t is stars, not the kind of star, the incandescent star that Ruth was or Mantle was or Koufax was. And so when I’m thinking, you know, who’s the number four going up there on my mountain, I couldn’t think of one. So that got me thinking about the problem that Major League Baseball is having in marketing itself.”, and yes, it’s worth putting under the Christmas tree of your favorite baseball fan, especially one who might be wondering in which direction this game is headed.For example, even before the confetti had hit the ground in L.A., current commissioner Rob Manfred was casually talking about a lockout following the 2026 season and acting like it was no big deal. “You may remember that in the offseason after ’21 , after baseball came back, all the headlines were ‘Baseball’s dead. Baseball’s dying. Baseball’s breaking. Baseball’s broken. Baseball should be federalized,” Leavy said. There are ways to solve the economic disparity between the haves and the have-lesses – no major-league ownership, may we remind you, is clipping coupons – with imagination rather than another labor war. The game on the field is more attractive than it was when Leavy had lunch with Koufax and Joe Torre in Cooperstown in 2019, the occasion of Mariano Rivera’s Hall of Fame induction. “They were talking, you know, ‘the game isn’t the same, it’s not the game we played,’” she said. “And Joe says, ‘Hard to watch.’ And Sandy said, ‘I don’t watch.’ “And I thought to myself, that’s the story. If I’m the only person at this table who watches baseball every night – and will even watch a baseball game on GameDay , under the tablecloth at parties, at dinner parties that I host, there’s something wrong here.” The result was her journey to rediscover the game. She spent time at the game’s roots . She checked out its new nerve centers . And she visited one of the few attractions where joy and imagination converge . “I ended up writing a book that was kind of like ‘Travels with Janie’ without the dog,” she quipped. She was, she said, “going to every level of baseball and talking to people, anonymous and otherwise, about how well the new rules were working and what else had to be done. And if they had said nothing else needs to be done, it’s perfect the way it is, you know, I might have said, ‘OK, I got no book to write.’The pitch clock and rules changes to emphasize the running game do help, though she noted that “Maury Wills would be cursing the sky” over the bigger bases. “But it doesn’t solve the fact that pitching arms are getting torn like cheap Christmas wrapping paper,” she said. “It doesn’t solve the fact that the stands are empty half the time and that it’s too expensive to go to games.” And, she added, “what you don’t see is a lot of kids. And what you also don’t see are a lot of Black Americans. And those are two of the other issues that really trouble me. So in my major leagues, when I’m commissioner, all kids under the age of 10, accompanied by a sober adult, get in free.”“Had the Cubs done this in 2023 – and if Grandpa bought the kid a small Coke, a small hot dog, a small cap and maybe cotton candy – it would have cost the Cubs $4 million,” she said. “That’s the same year the Cubs paid Jason Heyward $21 million to play for the Dodgers.” Fan affordability is certainly an issue. The seeming disconnect between players and fans is an issue; she notes in the book an afternoon when the Reds’ Joey Votto, unavailable because of an injury, spent the afternoon in the stands talking to fans. And just fan friendliness, or at least concern for the fan experience, is an issue. Leavy said in her conversation with Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, one of the many baseball people she interviewed, he told her when he was a kid growing up in San Diego he’d “go to the ballpark when the gates opened to watch batting practice and infield practice. It was a chance to see Ozzie Smith do big tricks and backflips and somersaults and all the things that Ozzie could do. “I used to get to Yankee Stadium when the gates opened so that I could watch Mickey Mantle take batting practice. How many thousands of kids became baseball fans by watching Mickey Mantle?” That’s not possible today, because now the home team takes batting practice first, before the gates open. These are small things in the grander scheme, true. But shouldn’t making your game attractive to future ticket-buyers matter? Then there’s the money-fueled romance with gambling companies, another instance of tone-deafness among the game’s custodians. The recent prop bet scandal involving Cleveland reliever Emanuel Clase? “It was inevitable,” she said. “I don’t think it took a genius to know this was gonna happen. … and I’m afraid we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.” “I love that it was an 18-inning game because it pointed up the shortsightedness of short-circuiting the rules with the ghost runner in the regular season,” she said. “I will be satisfied, reluctantly satisfied, if they let them go through the batting order one more time . They’ve saved enough time that I think they can afford to take the chance to allow games to end in a natural way.”Under the new law, how close can you park to a street corner?Police standoff and shooting shuts both sides of 5 Freeway near Camp Pendleton for hoursLa Habra knocks out Oaks Christian, reaches Division 4 football title gameParamount Skydance cutting nearly 200 jobs in HollywoodNo signs California won’t move forward with redistricting despite a court blocking similar plan in Texas
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