Hi Everyone —
Jane Leavy is one of the giants.
If you have not read her Sandy Koufax book or Mickey Mantle book—or really any of her books, including her novel Squeeze Play—you’re missing out. Jane brings this keen-eyed mix of wide-eyed enthusiasm and weary worldliness to everything she does. She has a voice that’s truly her own.
Jane’s new book, Make Me Commissioner, is exactly what the title promises: what Jane would do if she were running baseball. And what I like most about it is what I like most about Jane— she doesn’t hedge, she doesn’t equivocate. She comes right at you.
Here’s how she would fix pitching injuries. He’s what she’d do about the sports shift toward analytics. Here’s how she’d handle the zombie runner. Bam. Bam. Bam. One after another.
You can agree with some of it, all of it, or none of it, but there’s no mistaking where she stands — or how much she wants to bring back the magic to the game she’s loved all her life. This book is meant to spark conversations, arguments, and meaningful talk about what baseball should look like over the next 25 years.
It doesn’t hurt that Jane basically knows everybody in baseball — so the book is filled with voices and ideas from all corners of the game. And yes, Sandy makes an appearance or two.
Below, Jane has written an essay just for JoeBlogs readers about Make Me Commissioner.
And tonight at 7 p.m, we’ll be talking about it, talking about baseball, and answering a few reader questions. You won’t want to miss it.
We’ll see you there!
In the meantime, get the book!
The Importance of Fairy Dust
By Jane Leavy
One day, when I was quite young, actress Mary Martin, otherwise known as Peter Pan, covered me with fairy dust. She kept a jar filled with glittery silver stuff on the table in her dressing room for the occasional child who needed an assist en route to Never, Never Land. “Just think lovely, wonderful thoughts and up you go,” she said.
This was sometime after the original Broadway production--a limited run of 152 sold-out performances--closed on Broadway so that it could be broadcast live on NBC, a harbinger of the profound shift, precipitated by technology, that undermined the communal experience of entertainment. She had brought a truncated version of the show to a school gym somewhere in Westchester, New York. My father, the entertainment lawyer, had arranged for my older sister and me to be strapped into the Inter-Related Pendulum flying system created by Peter Foy for Broadway. My mother insisted we wear skirts.
My sister was mortified. I crowed.
Baseball had fairy dust back then. The only thing comparable to soaring in Peter’s leather harness was the first time I emerged from one of the hulking tunnels at the Yankee Stadium into the Bronx light, casting its magic on the perfect green of the baseball field.
In Make Me Commissioner, I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How To Fix It, I set out to learn why baseball lost its ability to transport. Why the limo driver arriving at my door at 5 am last week to take me to an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe shrugged when I asked if he was a baseball fan. I haven’t gotten a positive response to that question since the book was published on September 9.
I think I know one of the reasons. Cam Schlittler, the hunky, rookie, Yankee hurler, offered a master class the night before I arrived on the “Morning Joe” set, ready to extoll the virtues of a 24-year-old pitcher, drafted by the Yankees in the seventh round in 2022 when he had maybe a 90 mph fastball, who started the season in Double A--and was called to the majors and this elimination game because two Yankee starters shredded their ulnar collateral ligaments.
Schlittler came to the mound that evening with fairy dust--a four-seam fastball that traveled in excess of 100 mph six times in the first inning—and a two-seamer. His transformation is the story of present-day pitching, of scaling up velo and stuff. Scaling up became a thing when everything became measurable. The Yankees took him to their “Gas Station,” the coy name given to the pitching lab built with the guidance of Sam Briend, a Driveline refugee, who is now the Yankees’ director of pitching.
Driveline, the first data-driven baseball training center and subject of two of my chapters, is where founder Kyle Boddy demonstrated that velo can be scaled up. “Back in the day, it was like, ‘You’re either born with 90 or not,’” said former Driveline trainer Maxx Garrett. “Kyle challenged that and put training protocols in place where you can actually train velocity.”
The Yankees put gas in Schlittler’s fastball and, in so doing, fashioned an instant hero, recalling a pitching archetype, the young unknown who comes out of nowhere (in this case, Walpole, MA) to overwhelm the senses and his opponents (in this case, his home team, the Boston Red Sox). Unseemly tweets from Red Sox Nation, calling him a turncoat and worse, had turned him into a “silent killer,” he said after the game, the first MLB pitcher in postseason history to throw eight scoreless innings, strike out 12 and walk none.
His performance was enlivening and enlightening. When Aaron “Fucking” Boone of all people allowed him to go back to the mound for the eighth inning, the response from ESPN’s broadcasters and the sell-out crowd was first shock (what with Boonie’s bullpen?) and then an ovation, not just for what he had done but for what he was being allowed to do. An ovation that demonstrated the hunger for old-fashioned starting pitching, the guys in the booth said.
In a world where starting pitchers average 5.2 innings per game, where the best of them in both leagues managed just two complete games in 2025, Schlittler’s bravura performance was a reminder of what the game used to be. A game of match-ups between aces, and match-ups between those aces and guys who had their number. Those match-ups forged relationships-- Kershaw v. Bumgarner, Koufax v. Aaron—that extended beyond the third time around the batting order to seasons and decades of competitive brilliance. They were a reason to go out to the ballpark. Analytics killed those narratives, demonstrating with brutal, numerical efficiency the advantage of throwing max heave gas for as long as a body allows. In my view, the resulting devaluation of the starter, the gun slinger on the hill, is the biggest change in the character and experience of the game.
The Yankees worked with Schlittler to develop a compelling movement profile and to put 20 pounds of muscle on his 6’6” frame. They did this knowing that every time he, or any other elite pitcher, throws the ball with intent, his shoulder rotates seven thousand degrees per second, which is like a wheel turning at over 65 miles an hour. That effort puts intolerable stress on the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow. That one-inch piece of issue in Schlittler’s elbow isn’t any bigger or stronger in an average 24-year-old male. As Glenn Fleisig, research director at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, told me: “It turns out those little rubber bands don’t seem to be bigger and stronger than the ulnar collateral ligaments of previous generations. So that’s the problem. We have the old-model ulnar collateral ligament and new and improved humans!”
That’s why two-thirds of the billion dollars MLB paid injury-listed players not to play in 2024 were the result of pitching injuries. Why just shy of 40 percent of the pitchers active in 2024 had had Tommy John surgery.
It’s not just unhealthy for them. It’s unhealthy for the game. You can’t root for guys who aren’t there.
That’s why when I’m commissioner, we’re reinventing today’s pitching staff, adding two, perhaps three, pitchers to the current total of 13 and creating a healthy scratch list like the one in the NHL. Every day, the manager will designate which eleven pitchers will be active for the game, presumably the healthiest and most matchable, as a way of nudging the game back to the era when the same pitchers who traveled north with the team finished the season on the team. As opposed to say who used 47 different pitchers during the 2025 regular season, one more than the Mets. Pitchers will have to learn to throw at something less than max heave in order to consume innings. Guys on the taxi squad can throw on the side to accustom themselves to throwing more often, but with less velocity. The additional salaries are to be paid with money saved on medical bills.
I mean to be an enforcer: protecting arms as well as the interests of the fans. So: no pitcher may be relieved during an inning unless he has been charged with a run in that inning. And if the Tommy John rate exceeds 45 percent, I’m implementing the 95-mph rule suggested by an upper echelon MLB honcho who said, not quite facetiously, that any pitch clocked at more than 95 mph will be called a ball. To which I amended, “Except for one pitch per at-bat to keep hitters guessing.” It’s not as crazy as it sounds or as crazy as Rob Manfred’s proposal for a golden at-bat, enabling a manager to substitute his best hitter for his worst hitter once a game. And to hell with the order of things.
There’s this, too. Any manager who removes a pitcher after seven perfect innings for any reason other than that his arm has fallen off loses his challenges for the next ten games. “That’s fair,” said Dodger manager Dave Roberts, who’s done so more than anyone else.
And I’m just getting started.
