Jane Leavy knows baseball. And she really loves baseball. She’s a former sportswriter and author of best-sellers about Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle. Her new book is Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix it. The book is a skillful mix of history, personal connections, and insights based on watching innumerable games as a lifetime fan. She writes about the way baseball has been affected by changes in technology, from “moneyball” math to television cameras intruding on the playing field, the shift in ownership from families to billionaires, even the way stadiums are designed, the shift from “the sun is the pitchclock,” keeping the action going to one estimate that there are only 17 minutes of action in a baseball game. She explains how they have affected the game and what it would take to get a new generation of fans to fall in love with what we used to call America’s Pastime.
I especially enjoyed her chapter about the Savannah Bananas, a minor league team that is all about the fans – even their name came from a fan. I learned the most from her chapter about the “Tommy John surgery” that more than a third of professional pitchers end up needing, from her conversations with baseball stadium architect Janet Marie Smith, and from her critique of baseball’s failure to support Black players, while still pointing to Jackie Robinson’s historic time in the major league as key to its history. What comes through on every page is how much she loves every bit of the game, its players, and its coaches and managers. She also loves baseball movies, and I asked her to give me her favorites.
“Pride of the Yankees”
Because of Gary Cooper’s chin. Because sometimes I need a good cry. Because home plate at the old Yankee Stadium was one long, loud foul ball from my grandmother’s parlor. At bottom, your relationship with the game is personal, perhaps intimate.
“Bull Durham”
Because it celebrates the language of baseball, how they really talk and the practiced answers dictated by Crash Davis, the washed up big league catcher, on how to answer a question without saying anything. Derek Jeter was a master of the art. The love affair between Crash and Annie, the ultimate clubhouse Annie, is of course a metaphor for the love of the game–only wetter and funnier.
“A League of Their Own”
Because it tells a story that needed to be told about the women who pinch-hit for Major League Baseball during WW II. It gets all the details right and by doing so gives the women implicit credibility. Penny Marshall got it. Baseball is funny. “There’s no crying in baseball.”
“Bang the Drum Slowly”
Hollywood’s best and most faithful treatment of literary baseball fiction, Mark Harris’s novel about the New York Mammoths and the friendship between their star pitcher and his terminally ill catcher. Robert DeNiro and Michael Moriarty are sublime. Beautiful.
“Eight Men Out”
John Sayles important film about the 1919 Chicago Black Sox cheating scandal that has renewed relevance now that MLB has decided gambling is okay and Donald Trump has twisted arms to get reprobate Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame.
“Moneyball”
The origin story of baseball analytics with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill as a cuddly odd couple: handsome Billy Beane, insurgent general manager of the Oakland As, and Hill his fictional analytics guy because the real one, Paul DePodesta, wanted no part of the movie. By the time it premiered in 201, eight years after Michael Lewis’ book, analytics had sunk its teeth into the game. Beane’s methods were old hat and every general manager aspired to look and dress just like him. Hollywood took the usual liberties. Beane did not fire scouting director Grady Fusion because he objected to drafting a fat catcher. But the movie mattered.
“The Natural”
Barry Levinson changed the ending of Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel to let Robert Redford play the hero Robert Redford had to be, invoking magical realism as opposed to just plain realism. Redford knocks the lights out. Glenn Close, the lady in white, summons the best from damaged Roy Hobbs. Irresistible.
Tie “The Bad News Bears” and “Angels in the Outfield.”
Walter Matthau and Christopher Lloyd with wings.
“Field of Dreams”
I hated W.S. Kinsella’s treacly, overwrought novella “Shoeless Joe” and I hate everything it’s led to. Especially MLB’s Field of Dreams games in 2021-2023, played not on the diamond Hollywood carved out of an Iowa cornfield but in a pop-up ballpark made to look old with faux pine adhesive padding. And those corn stalks Ray Liotta stepped out of as Shoeless Joe Jackson in search of redemption? Plastic. The landscaper, Chris Krug, told me. He was the Cubs’ catcher whose errant throw allowed the only run to score in Sandy Koufax’s perfect game. But I’m a sucker for James Earl Jones, more so now that he’s gone. And that book banning scene plays really well in 2025.
“Damn Yankees.”
The Fifties: when people wanted to play baseball so much, they’d do a deal with the devil. Whatever Lola wants.
