Jane Leavy has always loved the game of 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 in 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 by establishing a pitch clock and altering rules to speed up the game and amplify the action. The league is investing in developmental youth baseball programs in disadvantaged communities where participation and fandom have plummeted. No one yet knows how to keep pitching arms healthy but Leavy has some ideas.
Yet the questions linger: how much have these efforts helped and how much more can be done to improve the game and reassert its place in American culture? Leavy takes a whirlwind tour of the country seeking answers to those questions, talking with luminaries like Joe Torre, Dave Roberts, Jim Palmer, Dusty Baker, Alex Bregman, Yu Darvish, Marquis Grissom, stadium architect Janet Marie Smith, statistical guru Bill James, fantasy baseball creator Dan Okrent, ageless pitching raconteur Bill "Spaceman" Lee, and the entertainers behind baseball's social media phenomenon The Savannah Bananas. 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.