What Not to Fix About Baseball

"To borrow a baseball term of art (okay, a cliché), Jane Leavy is an elite spitballer. No one is better built than Leavy, a crafty veteran sportswriter, for between-innings repartee, wry asides, and tossed-off ideas for improving her beloved sport-and maybe even keeping its ever-looming obsolescence at bay for another decade or three. Leavy's suggestions for spicing up baseball reflect the essence of spitballing-a pastime within a pastime."

"Baseball's most devoted fans have a long tradition of complaining loudly about what's wrong with the game and insisting that they'd run it better if given the chance. Surely, they are smarter than any clueless manager or hapless commissioner. They can be insufferable. But not Leavy, not ever. She has a distinctly kinetic way of making her case, like a rollicking tour guide through a stuffy museum. She also knows there's only so much that can be done to renovate the tradition,"

Imaginative proposals aim to spice up baseball while respecting longstanding traditions rooted in nineteenth-century origins. Suggestions blend humor, kinetic storytelling, and practical tweaks to speed play and enhance engagement. Devoted fans often loudly critique the game's flaws and insist they could manage it better, sometimes becoming insufferable in their certainty. Recent rule changes designed to speed action have helped restore enthusiasm for many viewers. The perspective balances enthusiasm for innovation with recognition that structural limits and deep traditions constrain how much can be renovated without altering the game's core identity.

Read at The Atlantic