A MARTÍNEZ, BYLINE: Sports writer and reporter Jane Leavy has written five books, all of them about baseball.
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UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER #1: Sandy into his windup. Here's the pitch. Swing on and miss. The perfect game.
MARTÍNEZ: There are biographies about Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth, and a novel sort of based on her own career about a female beat writer for a big league baseball team. This lifelong love the game has led to her latest work about what she doesn't love about it.
JANE LEAVY: I went looking for another star of the magnitude of Koufax, Mantle and Ruth, who I'd spent the better part of 20 years writing about. And I couldn't find a guy to fit that dimension. That troubled me. And I started to think, why is that? I think it has a lot to do with the way that analytics preclude a certain kind of stardom.
MARTÍNEZ: Jane Leavy's new book is titled "Make Me Commissioner: I Know What's Wrong With Baseball And How To Fix It." So, Jane, you usually write about people involved in baseball. What made you change course for this book?
LEAVY: The issue of how to entertain people has gotten lost. One of the examples I use is the story about Clayton Kershaw, who of course is the great Dodger lefty and has done pretty much everything there is to do in baseball except throw a perfect game. He had been on the injured list again for his arm. But lo and behold, his first start for the Dodgers in 2022 is in Minnesota.
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UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER #2: (Laughter) Oh, my goodness.
UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER #3: Seven perfect innings from Clayton Kershaw.
LEAVY: And he goes through seven innings, and he's got a perfect game. And the decision is to pull him out of the game.
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UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER #3: Dave Roberts makes maybe the hardest decision of his managerial career here.
LEAVY: Dave Roberts and I talked about this at great length, and it's clear that it pained him to do it. But what I said to him is, wouldn't it have been in baseball's interest to have a headline that said the next day, Clayton Kershaw, greatest lefty, throws a perfect game on his first outing of the year? As opposed to Clayton Kershaw was pulled out of a perfect game...
MARTÍNEZ: Right.
LEAVY: ...After seven innings.
MARTÍNEZ: But, Jane, analytics has been used in basketball. The Golden State Warriors are famous for starting their dynasty by relying on analytics, and it's all over every other sport. Why has that not worked as well, in your opinion, in baseball as it has in other sports?
LEAVY: Well, it works better in football because in football, it tells you to go for it on fourth down, which is exciting. In baseball, it works against what makes baseball exciting.
MARTÍNEZ: It sounds like you're asking baseball to be perfect in their decision. Please fans but also protect players. How is that possible?
LEAVY: Oh, it's not possible. I mean, maybe the best quote in the book is Joe Torre saying, about analytics, they're asking an imperfect game to be perfect, and I resent that.
MARTÍNEZ: Now, recently, Jane, Major League Baseball made some pretty sweeping changes. I think the biggest shock was the pitch clock. How do you think that one's gone so far?
LEAVY: It's the best, and it's worked beautifully. It just took way too long for them to recognize that part of the problem was it's a 19th century game originated by guys who had pocket watches. And they didn't adjust to the world changing around them. But Theo Epstein, who came on board...
MARTÍNEZ: And he's the executive who led the Cubs and the Red Sox to their...
LEAVY: Right.
MARTÍNEZ: To World Series titles, yeah.
LEAVY: So in 2021, when he came on board, the average time between balls put in play was three minutes and 52 seconds. As Theo said to me, you have 12 minutes to sell the game to a 6-year-old, and you're going to get two or maybe three balls in play in that time. That's impossible.
MARTÍNEZ: Every April 15, Major League Baseball celebrates Jackie Robinson Day. And you write that the league claims, quote, "a high moral ground to which it is no longer entitled." Why not?
LEAVY: Well, because the league allowed the percentage of Black major leaguers to drop from a high point of nearly 20% to now 6%. The neglect of that population, which they have begun to address - and I give them props for that - not only changed what was available to kids, it changed the texture of the sport because Black players brought a different style of play that is sorely missing. The speed disappeared with the Black players.
MARTÍNEZ: Now, the Savannah Bananas.
LEAVY: (Laughter).
MARTÍNEZ: It's baseball's answer to basketball's Harlem Globetrotters in many ways.
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UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER #4: Oh, he lights the ball on fire.
MARTÍNEZ: If, Jane, you invented baseball today, would it look more like the MLB that we know or would it be more like the Savannah Bananas?
LEAVY: Well, it would look more like baseball.
MARTÍNEZ: (Laughter).
LEAVY: I'm not in favor of having a whole pitching staff break into tap dance on the pitching mound. But I do think that Jesse Cole, the owner, the man in the yellow tux, zeroed in on something that baseball has been really laggardly about, their obligation to entertain the fans. I mean, I had an argument with Mike Rizzo, former Nats GM about this. Why can't players on the injured list go into the stands and let kids sign their jerseys? Why can't somebody be required to stay the way Cal Ripken did after every home game in Baltimore and sign every autograph? There are things that they can do that are simple.
MARTÍNEZ: So, Jane, I mean, we've talked a lot about what maybe you're not happy with about baseball. But I want to know what you still love about baseball, because the thing I love the most about baseball is when the season start, there's always another game tomorrow. So what do you still love the most about baseball?
LEAVY: I love the choreography of the game. I love seeing the way infielders used to (laughter) turn a double play and the choreography around the bag, when you could see their footwork. I love the craft of the game. I love the people. One of the things that was great about this book was the opportunity to go around and just meet so many wonderful baseball people who care about the technique, who care about the history, who accept that analytics is a part of the game but are pleading for them to be used in a way that doesn't obviate what in the dugout is now called the human element.
MARTÍNEZ: That's Jane Leavy. Might be the next commissioner of baseball. Her new book is "Make Me Commissioner: I Know What's Wrong With Baseball And How To Fix It." Jane, thank you very much.
LEAVY: Thank you, A. It was great.
(SOUNDBITE OF VINCE GUARALDI TRIO'S "BASEBALL THEME") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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