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The pace of baseball encourages talk. Every situation brings discussion and speculation. Should we steal here? Bunt? Play the infield in? Walk him? Pitch him inside? Outside? Even in its slightly sped‑up form, the game allows time for this. And there is time after to analyze. The Toronto Blue Jays’ narrow defeat in last year’s World Series provided a wealth of second-guessing opportunities. Should Kiner-Falefa have taken a bigger lead? Should they have used someone other than Hoffman to pitch the ninth? Should they have sent the runner to prevent the series-ending double play?

Baseball people love to talk. Sometimes it’s not that interesting — as in the moment right after the game when the home-run hitter tells the reporter he just looked for his pitch and tried to put a good swing on it — but as the moment recedes into memory, the talk becomes more frank, less formulaic.

Jane Leavy loves to talk too. She has written books about Babe Ruth, Sandy Koufax, and, most memorably, Mickey Mantle, whose sad story she chronicled in The Last Boy, one of the most moving baseball books ever written. Her latest is Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It. The book doesn’t really make good on her promise to fix baseball. There is the odd recommendation sprinkled among the pages. The best ones are about returning the fun to youth baseball, which, in an era of elite travel teams and showcases for scouts, seems to have sold its soul. But the real value of Make Me Commissioner is in the impressive array of baseball people Leavy has connected with to talk about the state of the game. After years as a sports journalist, she knows everybody: current and former players, scouts, managers, general managers, journalists, stats gurus, and ordinary folks hanging out in the stands in the Cape Cod Baseball League. They all have opinions, and they all talk honestly with her.

Her thesis is not new: basically, it’s that the game has been ruined by the research into it. Beginning in the late 1970s, insiders found more sophisticated ways of using the statistics that define baseball. More recently, technology has allowed analysts to measure the velocity and spin rate of pitches, the bat speed and launch angle of batters.

No harm done, you might say. New statistical tools help people (well, some people) understand the game better. But some of the applications have changed the game itself. Pitchers are now taught to throw 100 miles per hour. As a result, strikeouts and arm injuries increase — and the pitchers have to leave games earlier. Starting pitcher, once the glamour position, is no longer the kid player’s dream.

At the plate, research shows, the most efficient way to score runs is not to hit a double and a single — or two singles plus a stolen base — but to hit the ball over the fence. That seems obvious, but in practice it means that a team will be quite content to have two batters strike out if the third batter homers.

“Strikeouts have a negligible effect on runs scored,” a pioneering baseball researcher, Bill James, wrote back in 1985. What a change! When I was growing up, striking out was a disgrace. Last season, I heard Blue Jays announcers commenting favourably on the fact that a certain hitter was striking out more frequently. This, to them, meant that he was swinging harder and more likely to hit the ball over the fence — if he hit it.

The strikeout is the ultimate goal of the defence. In the stadiums, such as Toronto’s Rogers Centre, scoreboard operators work themselves into an over-amplified frenzy whenever an opposing player has two strikes, pumping up the importance of the looming K, even though a ground-ball double play would have far greater value. It would also be far more interesting to watch — which is the point critics make in Leavy’s book.

Home runs cause fireworks and big sound effects, but other forms of excitement are lost: the triple, the bunt, and the stolen base, which are all devalued by the research. Leavy quotes Roger Angell, one of the greatest baseball writers. “I hate modern baseball. . . . It’s all strikeouts and home runs,” he told her, shortly before he died in 2022, at the age of 101. “The whole nature of the game has changed.”

Bill Lee, the former Montreal Expos and Boston Red Sox pitcher and freelance gadfly, has put it another way: “You know why it’s so fucking boring? Because everyone knows what’s going to happen. Somebody is gonna hit a home run and the closer is going to strike out the side in the ninth.”

You don’t have to look very far back to remember baseball immortals, such as Rod Carew, who didn’t hit home runs, and Greg Maddux, who didn’t strike out a lot of batters. Would they be valued in today’s game?

Fittingly, baseball’s sorry state can be measured by statistics. “In each of the last seven seasons, including 2024, strikeouts outnumbered hits. In each of those seasons, more balls were fouled off than put in play,” Leavy reports. “More than a third of at bats resulted in one of the dreaded Three True Outcomes: a walk, a K, or a home run.”

How should things change? As Angell sagely observed, “The chaos of the ball in play is what baseball is all about!” However, baseball scientists have shown the executives how to win by minimizing the chaos. Sandy Alderson, a former general manager of the Oakland A’s, tells Leavy, “We’ve inbred to the point where everybody thinks the same way, looks the same way, approaches the game the same way, makes the same decisions, all of it with a view toward efficiency and risk aversion.”

We can see similar lines of thinking in other sports. In hockey, less skilled teams clog centre ice and take no chances offensively. In soccer, the same thing happens, except more slowly. In basketball, the three-point shot is favoured over the drive to the basket. In football . . . well, who knows, except that nothing happens until a dozen guys wearing headsets say so.

One of the most powerful observations Leavy and her interlocutors make is that fitting baseball into a formula deprives it of its stories. A prime example is the almost total disappearance of the no‑hitter: a pitcher going an entire nine innings without giving up a hit.

The no-hitter is a rarity — seen by purists as a step to baseball immortality — yet baseball science doesn’t like it. A pitcher, it has been demonstrated, is easier to hit the longer he stays in the game. And he could hurt his arm. More often than not, he is replaced around the sixth inning, if not before. But what if he hasn’t given up a hit yet? What if the fans are excited and hanging on his every throw? Tough luck. Seventeen times in the 2024 season, a pitcher was taken out of the game after giving up no hits for six or more innings. In 2022, Clayton Kershaw of the Dodgers, a fan favourite, was making his first start since spending a year on the injured list. He pitched seven perfect innings. A perfect game — no batter reaching base by hit, walk, hit-by-pitch, or error — is even rarer than a no‑hitter. The manager took Kershaw out. One of Kershaw’s former catchers, A. J. Ellis, was broken-hearted: “I think that sometimes what gets lost in the shuffle is what our responsibility is in this game. We need stories, we need heroes, we need narratives. We need to retake some of the ground that basketball and football and soccer kind of stripped away from baseball. And this was an opportunity to do that.”

Closer to home, Canadian baseball observers still debate the decision to lift the Blue Jays starter José Berríos after three shutout innings in a 2023 playoff game. On the flip side, they will talk for years about another starter, Max Scherzer, profanely persuading the same manager to let him stay in game 4 in the 2025 World Series.

Leavy roams widely in Make Me Commissioner, from major-league ballparks to a conference of statistical wizards and a game featuring the Savannah Bananas, the baseball equivalent of basketball’s Harlem Globetrotters. What elevates her book beyond mere complaining is the quality of those who talk to her.

Consider the former manager Dusty Baker: “The people running the game are running the people who played the game out of it.” Or another former manager, Joe Torre, who grieves the loss of “the unpredictability that makes our game exciting.” There’s also the former pitching great Jim Palmer bemoaning the emphasis on throwing 100 mph: “Dig down or mix stuff up. Keep people off balance. Use all your wits.” It’s not only old-timers. The switch-hitting New York Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor, for example, says, “If you stop the manipulation of players getting paid through analytics, then the game will fix itself.”

Is that possible? An argument could be made based on the most recent Fall Classic. There was unpredictability: a ball getting stuck in the fence, a game-saving catch in the outfield despite the outfielders colliding, two game-ending double plays. Sure, the Three True Outcomes dominated again in the regular season, but the game did in fact become more entertaining and the World Series especially so.

More to the point, the Blue Jays won the American League in a relatively old-school way: They led the majors in batting average, that neglected stat, and, even though strikeouts are not supposed to be bad any more, they struck out fewer times. Their fielding, another devalued skill, was excellent. And they were within two outs of winning it all (except for, um, a Dodgers home run).

Baseball has been tinkering in the past few years: putting in a pitch clock, eliminating defensive shifts, starting extra innings with the silly runner-on-second rule. As I write this, I see a proposal that outfielders be restricted in where they can position themselves, because they’re catching too many balls that might be doubles (which could, in due time, lead to a demand for another rule change because there are too few spectacular catches).

Good luck with all of that. Sports change when teams find new ways to win. That can be bad, as we have seen, or it can be good. Since all sports are copycats, other teams may try the Blue Jays’ way as they head into spring training. It is possible to hope, then, that we will see a return of the chaos of the ball in play.