What Not to Fix About Baseball

To borrow a baseball term of art (okay, a cliché), 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—and maybe even keeping its ever-looming obsolescence at bay for another decade or three.

Leavy’s suggestions for spicing up baseball reflect the essence of spitballing—a pastime within a pastime. Baseball’s most devoted fans have a long tradition of complaining loudly about what’s wrong with the game and insisting that they’d run it better if given the chance. Surely, they are smarter than any clueless manager or hapless commissioner. They can be insufferable.

But not Leavy, not ever. She has a distinctly kinetic way of making her case, like a r