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Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: How to Fix Baseball with author Jane Leavy
Description: For hard-core baseball folks, for anyone who cares for the future of the game, veteran baseball writer Jane Leavy compels attention with her provocative book, Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball And How To Fix It (Grand Central, 2025). Our conversation focuses on her proposed solutions to the core problem of a sport in the destructive grip of a data-driven analytics mindset. For example, because the numbers crowd dictates that hitters should swing for the fences, they too often strike out, and home runs themselves, she says, have become boring. Her fix: wrap plexiglass around the outf...