PositiveThe AtlanticJane Leavy is an elite spitballer ... No one is better built than Leavy, a crafty veteran sportswriter, for between-innings repartee, wry asides, and tossed-off ideas for improving her beloved sport ... She has a distinctly kinetic way of making her case, like a rollicking tour guide through a stuffy museum ... I’d quibble with the premise that baseball is in need of much ‘fixing’ these days ... [Levy] is the rare historian who writes without a speck of pretension, and whose prose reads like she’s typing and shelling pistachios at the same time ... The best ideas in her book are less in the vein of rule changes than they are in cultural initiatives to repair baseball’s diminished appeal among many demographic groups ... Make Me Commissioner has some good ideas. But I loved it less as a catalog of clinical prescriptions than as a kind of baseball soapbox, a celebration of storytelling and spitballing in the best oral and literary traditions of the sport ... The tale she’s lived to tell emerges, for all its crotchety complaints, from a place of unerring loyalty ... She hosts a wickedly fun house party.
