One writer’s plan to rescue baseball from itself

On Saturday night Oct my husband managed to pry me away from the second encounter 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 sought to scream I presumably 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 latest years attendance began declining at ballparks around the country in the late s Television viewership of Major League Baseball games has stagnated The NFL has become ascendant with a Pew Research Center survey finding that by a wide margin Americans considered football to be America s sport For multiple the encounter that was fondly and famously described as America s national pastime began to completely 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 match World Series that saw the Dodgers come from behind to defeat the Blue Jays on Saturday night in a contest that extended to innings making them rare back-to-back champions there s no better time to contemplate how to turn the tide MLB s evidence obsession in the Moneyball era has stymied the challenge 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 hardware by and large hasn t helped MLB s content obsession in the Moneyball era has stymied the challenge 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 event 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 declared he will retire after his term ends in is playful tongue-in-cheek But baseball would do well to take her candidacy seriously Leavy s passion for the battle is infectious and as a woman her poll 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 unit the return of afternoon baseball games better food options and making the sport more accessible to television viewers are just a insufficient of her proposals With notable exceptions such as the in the past few days introduced pitching clock which she celebrates Leavy advocates a managerial approach that balances the use of input and analytics with human instincts and gut feelings that have traditionally brought magic to baseball Over the class 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 championship three of the series which tied for the longest contest in World Series history we compared notes about the challenge and how we powered through I didn t even yawn Leavy reported I just got various popcorn Over email the afternoon before I had sought 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 Battle three was everything that s right with baseball and why it s fundamental 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 battle 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 required 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 of romantic thing in the book possibly for me is when my friend MIT Professor Anette Peko Hosoi I call her a humanist with math skills declared 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 Related In sports and politics Americans want a fair playing field Peko doesn t think that the majority people understand the extent to which our lives are already organized manipulated Predetermined Yes by algorithms Baseball is a gift to the st century if you have a predicament with the way we have deferred to device I find it unreal that the only science that is not questioned these days is facts 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 narrated 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 records We should be in control and we re not exerting that control And baseball is where you can see that happening largest part obviously There was that moment during the third meeting of the American League Wild Card Series on Oct 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 narrated to decide by details that he was done after seven And there was this roar in the ballpark and somebody on ESPN mentioned 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 stated 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 event 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 declared 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 battle day God bless me and these guys don t care I mean I think they care but they don t care for this event 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 the greater part 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 member 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 participant and that was major to him because in America nothing is more central than being requested for your signature And the Bananas assistant coach Adam Virant who s a recovering lawyer looked at me and he mentioned That kid just became a baseball fan Yeah And as one of those kids who already loved baseball and then played tee 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 championship 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 s for example The obstacle is that the analytics do not align with the things that are bulk 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 unfailingly 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 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 intriguing 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 dilemma is and it s all part of the instrument 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 concern is and it s all part of the apparatus 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 revealed 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 demands to think about If you want people to care you have to give them purchase on the competition 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 event And they ve taken specific really good initiatives 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 in contemporary times with the emphasis on analytics Who are selected of the players you see as bringing narrative to the competition Which players resonate the greater part 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 challenge 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 match 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 battle 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 encounter yeah We need your help to stay independent Subscribe in the current era to patronage Jason Kyle Howard s commentary You urged Who are the people who are energizing the match 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 championship People consistently 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 perpetually 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 particular people see it as showboating I see it as emotion And as Francisco Lindor stated to me in what may be the most of essential thing anybody mentioned 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 Read more about this topic Ending manhood in the hall of shame Pete Rose Donald Trump and the corruption of literally everything Taking down Jackie Robinson reveals what the fight against DEI is all about The post One writer s plan to rescue baseball from itself appeared first on Salon com