Rollicking ... Engaging ... Happily, Leavy’s book is not a rigid 10-point plan but a wide-ranging travelogue ... Leavy’s assorted reforms stretch from the attractive to the absurd ... At its best, Make Me Commissioner permits readers to eavesdrop on uncommonly rich conversations among seasoned baseball people ... Leavy aims less to persuade than to provoke, endeavoring to reinvigorate baseball with a sense of joy that she believes has gone missing.
Jane 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.
It wasn’t boring ... Leavy makes a strong case that the advent of analytics…sapped the magic out of a game ... Throughout this book, scattered among stories which don’t always further the narrative but will tickle most fans anyway, she offers dozens of ideas…to make the game fun again.
Jane Leavy has a voice demanding to be heard—and Major League Baseball should listen ... Ms. Leavy has written an angry manifesto masquerading as a charming memoir, or maybe it is the other way around ... Rob Manfred, the MLB commissioner, would be wise to heed Ms. Leavy’s message.
Irreverent analysis and fresh ideas ... Leavy captures the frustrations of fans everywhere in this charming, resourceful plea to reinvigorate a sport ... Her diagnosis of the sport’s plight, sharpened by reporting trips to spring-training complexes, amateur tournaments, data-in-sports confabs, and numerous games, is boldly stated ... Though some of her reporting is fruitless—she accomplishes little with a chapter about an independent pro team known for mediocre baseball and wacky promotions—Leavy’s blend of enthusiasm, knowledge, and iconoclasm prevails.
