Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Grand Central Publishing, and author Jane Leavy for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

Never before have I enjoyed a book so much that seems to totally miss the mark for what it promises to deliver. In short, I enjoyed the writing so much that I now have some of author Jane Leavy’s other books on my “to read” list (I already borrowed her Babe Ruth audiobook from the library). However, the majority of the book doesn’t really touch on the title subject at all.

Jane Leavy was a sportswriter for many years. She covered the Baltimore Orioles for the Washington Post. I could totally identify with her. Raised on Long Island, she was a Yankees fan at a time when girls still really didn’t play baseball. I missed out, too. I can remember being at the schoolyard hanging on the backstop, watching my (boy) friends play Little League.

The vast majority of Make Me Commissioner features Jane’s conversations with various baseball professionals. She talks with different players and former players, trying to get a feel for what’s wrong with the game and why it has lost its audience. The main villain she sees is the reliance on analytics, but she also acknowledges that it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Being a Mets fan, this season (2026) is a prime example of what she’s talking about. Over the past few years, the Mets have managed to consistently be close to an appearance in the World Series. Most people who watched the 2025 season knew the main weakness was pitching. Yet, in the off-season, three strong hitters were either lost to free agency or traded, and for nothing that seemed an improvement in return. I waited, hoping that I was wrong and that David Stearns, the Mets General Manager, could see something that I didn’t. Although they’ve looked a bit better in May, April showed that analytics isn’t everything.

In Make Me Commissioner, there are a lot of discussions around analytics, as well as explanations of what they are doing with it. Jane laughingly accuses the creator of rotisserie baseball of having ruined baseball, having been one of the first to use statistics to create a way that fans could play the game. She visits some of the places where this happens and gets an inside look at the world of baseball analytics.

The issue isn’t just bringing fans to the park, though. There’s also something to be said about the lack of young players. Kids need to fall in love with the game at a young age, but there are so many obstacles to that. It used to be that anyone with a bat and ball could play the game (see The Sandlot). Now everything is organized. Kids don’t just meet in the street and strike up a game the way it was when I was a kid. Now the parents have to be in the middle of everything and don’t let their kids out of their sight. Things like travel ball and playing clinics cost money, and it cuts out a portion of the population from being developed as talent. Leavy also talks about how some of this has harmed the talent pool in that pitching arms are getting abused quite young, and every hitter ends up batting the same, instead of finding out what feels natural to them.

All of this discussion is great, but it’s not until the last few pages that Leavy really gets into the changes she would make if she were the Commissioner of Baseball. The book feels disjointed, with a lot of what she has written being about what analytics has done to the game and how those who play the game feel about it. I learned some things from it. I never knew about some of the specialty clinics for professional ballplayers where they could go in the off-season to work on their swings or their arms. I thought all of that was done within the team itself, but that’s not the case anymore.

One of the problems, she argues, is that some of the fun is gone from the game. This is why the Savannah Bananas are currently so popular. She travels with them a bit and talks to those players, as well as the team’s owner, who risked everything to craft a team built around fun rather than winning. The 2024 season for the Mets was a lot like that. We had Narco with the trumpets for reliever Edwin Diaz, rapper and ballplayer Jose Iglesias, having a hit song about playing baseball with OMG, which became a hit for him and the team, and a cast of characters on the team that made the season fun. They were eliminated by the Dodgers in the playoffs that year, but afterwards, I didn’t feel bad. The season had been fun, and the players looked like they were having fun, too.

Apparently, though, David Stearns considers those things to be distractions from the game. It’s a perfect example of someone who looks at the numbers bout doesn’t grasp what brings the fans out. Leavy could have written her book on him alone. I’m glad she didn’t, though.

One problem I see that she only discussed in passing is the problem of finding the games to watch. It’s a product of this streaming era, where games are on different services. Where I used to know that my Mets would almost always be on SNY (cable) or WOR (broadcast), now games are all over the place. Just this past weekend, the Mets played the Yankees. The first game was on Apple TV. The second was on Fox. The final was on their usual location, SNY. Fans get frustrated and just stop watching. Living out of market now, I rely on MLB-TV, and yet after paying $149 for the privilege of watching the Mets suck, I have to subscribe to other services simply because all of these different streaming services pay MLB money. That sounds like a win for the MLB in the short run, but it’s creating a problem with fans in the long run.

I wish Make Me Commissioner had been a bit more cohesive. The subject is a great one, and Leavy has definitely made the case that baseball has problems. I think any of us who have a passion for baseball can see that. It goes beyond the usual discussion of players’ salaries and free agency. I wish, perhaps, she had organized it into one topic covered by each chapter. They can intertwine a bit, but if she had a chapter dedicated to streaming issues, a chapter dedicated to the use of analytics, a chapter dedicated to getting fans out to the ballpark, the book would have worked much better.

Still, I did enjoy the book and recommend it. There’s a lot of good information here and observations on what is happening in the game. There’s a discussion of the changes that have been implemented in the past few years as well. I’m a purist who doesn’t even like the designated hitter, never mind the pitch clock. Like me, Leavy seems to worry about the pitch clock having a detrimental effect on pitchers. There has to be a balance with analytics, but we’re not anywhere near a good place for that.