LOVERRO: Author Jane Leavy has a prescription for what ails baseball

OPINION:

Author Jane Leavy was on the veranda of the famed Otesaga Hotel overlooking the lake in Cooperstown, New York, for the 2019 Hall of Fame induction weekend when she was hit by a fastball right between the eyes.

Figuratively speaking.

She was there with two Hall of Famers — former New York Yankees manager Joe Torre and legendary Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax. In 2002, Leavy wrote a brilliant biography, “Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy.”

“Today’s game is not the game they played,” Leavy wrote in that book, remembering her conversation with the two legends.

“Inevitably, the subject turns to how hard pitchers are throwing and how little they are pitching. ‘Half the time the pitchers don’t even know where the ball is going,’ Sandy said. ‘Hard to watch,’ Joe replied. ‘I don’t watch,’ Sandy said.”

Here you had Koufax, one of the greatest pitchers in the history of the game, who can’t bring himself to watch it anymore, and Torre who has been involved in Major League Baseball for nearly 60 years, at the time employed as MLB’s chief baseball officer, saying his product was hard to watch on the most hallowed of weekends in the game.

For Leavy, whose love of baseball is soul deep, it was a stunning revelation. “I thought, how is it possible that I watch the MLB network by day and some ball games — any ball game — at night and final computer Yankee games on my iPhone under the table during dinner parties even once that I host and they don’t?”

It was a wake-up call of sorts that put Leavy on a path to try to find out what went wrong with the game she loved. Her investigation resulted in her latest book, “Make Me Commissioner — I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It” (Grand Central Publishing, on sale Sept. 9).

Pretty nervy to write a book declaring that she should be commissioner of baseball, but she has the bona fides – in addition to writing the definitive work on an icon like Koufax, Leavy also wrote the book on Mickey Mantle – “The Last Boy” in 2010. 

She followed that up with one of the best baseball and sports business books I’ve ever read – “The Big Fella – Babe Ruth and the World He Created” in 2018.

If knowledge and passion count, Leavy may be more qualified than the current commissioner.

The new book, though, is more than an examination of the warts of the game. It also reveals what is still right about baseball and tells stories about the personalities on each side of the divide in baseball between numbers and humanity.

“Analytics placed the premium on ‘working the count,’ ‘taking your walks,’ ‘grinding out at-bats,’ ‘making the pitcher work,’ exhausting him and fans to get rid of him early,” Leavy wrote. “That became moot once algorithms definitively demonstrated that no starting pitcher should face the lineup three times; max-heave pitching meant he wouldn’t last that long anyway. Put it all together and you had yourself an aesthetic problem. As Miami Marlins Vice President of Player Personnel, Sam Mondray Cohen put it, “the game’s smarter, stronger and uglier.”

She takes you behind the scenes at places like Driveline, a data-performance center in Titusville, Washington, where hitters and pitchers go to maximize the numbers to improve their production – more than 100 major league players have come through the lab, including 40 All-Stars, five MVPs and four Cy Young winners. 

She examines the appeal of the barnstorming Savannah Bananas and has conversations with baseball’s ambassador to another universe, former Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee. It is, as the back cover blurb describes, “a whirlwind tour of the country seeking answers” to the questions that have made the game uglier.

The godfather of the analytics movement, Bill James, recognizes that baseball is in danger of suffocating on statistics: “100% of the problem — relentless pressure on players and managers to find competitive advantages, on the one side, versus a complete lack of management (ownership and league officials) to defend against the negative consequences of that in the entertainment value of the sport.”

The book is not an attack on analytics and the recognition of its place in baseball. “It’s really hard to tell individual front offices that they should be dumber for the sake of the game,” Orioles general manager Mike Elias said.

But it is an entertaining and informative examination of the conflict inside clubhouses and front offices – choking on information while gasping for knowledge

• Catch Thom Loverro on “The Kevin Sheehan Show” podcast.