Jane LeavY — Make Me Commissioner: I Know What's Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It - with Mike Rizzo and Stefan Fatsis

Jane Leavy has always loved baseball. Her grandmother lived one long, loud foul ball away from Yankee Stadium--the same grandmother who took young Jane to Saks Fifth Avenue and bought her her first baseball glove. It's no coincidence that Leavy was covering the game she loved for the Washington Post by the late 1970s. As a pioneering female sportswriter, she eventually turned her talent to books, penning three of the all-time best baseball biographies about three of the all-time best players: Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, and Babe Ruth. But when she went searching for a fourth biographical subject, she realized that baseball had faltered. The Moneyball era of the last two decades obsessed over data and slowed the game down to a crawl, often at the expense of thrills, skills, and surprise. Major League Baseball has begun to address issues too long ignored, yet the questions linger: how much have these efforts helped to improve the game and reassert its place in American culture?Leavy takes a whirlwind tour of the country seeking answers to these questions, talking with luminaries like Joe Torre, Dave Roberts, Jim Palmer, Dusty Baker, and more. What Leavy uncovers is not only what's wrong with baseball--and how to fix it--but also what's right with baseball, and how it illuminates characters, tells stories, and fires up the imagination of those who love it and everyone who could discover it anew.Jane Leavy is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, and the comic novel Squeeze Play, which Entertainment Weekly called "the best novel ever written about baseball." She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 1979 to 1988, first in the Sports section, then writing for the Style section. She covered baseball, tennis, and the Olympics. She has written for many publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, and The Los Angeles Times, and was anthologized in The Great American Sports Page: A Century of Classic Columns.Mike Rizzo, the former President of Baseball Operations and General Manager of the Washington Nationals, having the past 17years leading the team. In a city without professional baseball for 33 years, Rizzo was charged with transforming a bare bones organization ranked at the bottom of the standings. Throughout his career with the Nationals, he built teams which won four division titles and, in 2019, a World Series championship. In doing so, he became only the sixth active GM to reach 1000 wins all with the same team. Rizzo is widely recognized for his astute scouting, shrewd trades and draft pick as well as for revamping the Nationals player development system. In 2019, after 11 seasons at the helm of the Washington Nationals, the teams won the World Series, defeating the Houston Astros in seven games. The come from behind victory gave Washington, D.C. its first World Series championship since 1924.Leavy and Rizzo are in conversation with Stefan Fatsis, the author of the New York Times bestseller Word Freak, about the world of competitive Scrabble; A Few Seconds of Panic, about life in the National Football League; and Wild and Outside, about minor league baseball. His latest book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary will be published in October by Grove Atlantic. In four decades as a journalist, Fatsis has written and talked for Slate, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and many other outlets. He lives in Washington, D.C. https://politics-prose.com/book/9780306834660?ic_referral=jhq4o6id2kOOd4_69L5T27DcCcyn27fgIfgyQYNO-hYwM2rE0jBUDFF-jlLexrJ6D1cSNVxXuthmpKMjVxbowliOKYBmRlSUcQv3He7T8bs99FF_djeeuai16pwQal3htcIyOOI