Interview with NYT Best-Selling Author Jane Leavy

  

1.What exactly is Make Me Commissioner about— and who is it written for? It’s about baseball, sure, and what can be done, beyond MLB’s recent rule changes, to reassert its cultural importance. But it’s also a cautionary tale about the challenge of the moment, the need to resist domination by technology, big data, and Artificial Intelligence. My friend Peko Hosoi at the MIT Sports Analytics Laboratory argues that baseball is the canary in the coal mine, warning us what happens when you surrender human judgement—what players call “the human element” -- as thoroughly as baseball has done. 

2.What do you hope readers will get out of reading your book? I hope they fall in love with baseball again and form a grass roots movement to make me commissioner.  

3.What inspired you to write this book? Breakfast with Joe Torre and Sandy Koufax at The Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown on Induction Weekend 2019. I sat uncomprehending as they diagnosed the problems with modern baseball in a private language particular to pitchers and catchers of the Golden Era. I didn’t understand a word until Joe said, “Hard to watch.” And Sandy replied, “I don’t watch.”  

4. Why do you say baseball needs fixing? MLB made a good, albeit belated, start with the rules imposed in 2023, specifically the pitch clock that shaved 24 minutes from the average game in 2021 to 2 hours and 38 minutes. The pace of play improved but the sameness of play, rosters, and lineups remained. Thanks to the Three True Outcomes, a third of all at bats ended in either a walk, a strike, or a home run. For the seventh consecutive year there were more strikeouts than hits. They need to reintroduce exciting elements of the game, doubles, triples, stolen bases, that fans say they want to see. They can’t continue to allow metrics to subvert what made baseball its best self.  

5. What are some of your solutions? A. Baseball needs to grow a new generation of fans. I propose allowing all kids t en years of age or less get in free if accompanied by an adult. If said adult buys said kid a small soda, hot dog, an ice cream and a cap, it would have cost the Cubs $4 million in 2023 as opposed to the $21 million they paid Jason Heyward to play for the Dodgers that year. It would be a PR coup and a strategy to grow the game.  

B. The percentage of Black American Major Leaguers has dropped from nearly 20 percent to six percent in 2025. Baseball can recoup some moral high ground and re-seed baseball in the inner city by using gambling profits to build baseball academies in each MLB city giving American kids the same opportunities and facilities maintained in the Dominican Republic. Baseball is a $12 billion a year industry. They can afford it. Also, it is the right thing to do, would add texture and style to the game.  

C. I am going to introduce a healthy scratch list, like the one used in the NHL, and increase the total number of pitchers to 15 but allow managers to use only 11 of them in each game. That way, overused pitchers, coached to throw max heave on every pitch, will get rest and starters will be compelled to sacrifice velocity, taking pressure off their arms, and reasserting the importance of the pitching ace. No pitcher will be allowed to pitch two consecutive days—and that includes warming up in the bullpen. Those pitches count too.  

6. Betting on every pitch — good or bad for the game? Terrible and inevitable once the Supreme Court cleared the way for sports betting in 2018. The money made it an easy decision but a complicated. After a century of righteous indignation at the scourge of gambling precipitated by the 1919 Chicago White Sox, after staking their reputation on repudiating Pete Rose, MLB turned on a dime, many dimes. It was also an example of baseball compromising its essential self. Since then, seven Major Leaguers have been suspended for gambling and God knows how many have received death threats from fans angry at having their wagers thwarted by honest effort. 

7. You have written books about the greats: Koufax, Mantle, and Ruth. Who is playing today that embodies such greatness?  No one. There are great players, great athletes capable of doing things great things their predecessors never conceived of doing but there are no great stars. The fact that I couldn’t find another baseball life worthy of joining that trio told me all you need to know about baseball in 2025. With the exception of Ohtani, they don’t know how to market their stars. Nor do they demand it of their players. Can you see any modern player cheerfully posing with a monkey or a lobster as Babe Ruth did on National Lobster Day? Or staying after every home game in Baltimore, as Cal Ripken Jr. did, to sign every autograph requested.  

8. How would you describe your writing style? In this book, my writing style is deliberately and perhaps excessively colloquial. I wanted to capture the rhythm and zest of baseball language as opposed to computer language now dominating its vocabulary. At its best, baseball language is earthy and evocative. To wit: a poorly hit fly ball that falls in for a hit has evolved from a Texas Leaguer into a blooper and finally, gloriously, into a duck fart.  

9. What challenges did you overcome in the writing of this book? I began reporting this book in January 2021 just about the time Theo Epstein was named Czar of Making Baseball Fun again by Commissioner Rob Manfred. The headlines that off-season went like this: “Is baseball dead?” “Baseball is dying.” “Baseball should be federalized.” By September 2022, when Epstein and Manfred announced the new rules coming in 2023—eliminating defensive shifts, making bases three inches bigger, limiting the number of times a hitter can step out of the box per at bat (1) and pitchers can step off the rubber (2) and imposing a pitch clock on the previously timeless enterprise—it was clear I couldn’t write the book I set out to write. So, I threw out pretty much everything I had and started over, setting out in January 2023 to learn what happened to baseball, how well the new rules worked, and what else needed to be done.  

10. If people can buy or read one book this week or month, why should it be yours? Because it will distract them from everything else going on in the world. And it’s funny. Baseball is funny . See above: duck fart.  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jane Leavy is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, and the comic novel Squeeze Play, which Entertainment Weekly called “the best novel ever written about baseball.” She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 1979 to 1988, first in the Sports section, then writing for the Style section. She covered baseball, tennis, and the Olympics. She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated,  and is anthologized in The Great American Sports Page: A Century of Classic Columns and Driven to Write For more information, please see : www.janeleavy.com.

 

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For the past three decades, Brian Feinblum has helped thousands of authors. He formed his own book publicity firm in 2020. Prior to that, for 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and as the director of publicity at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler.

 

His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully). He was recently interviewed by the IBPA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0BhO9m8jbs

 

He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, Morgan James Publishing, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.

 

His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.

 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.

 

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