Olasky Books: Make Me Commissioner

December is midway between the end of the baseball season in October and spring training reawakening in a Florida or Arizona February, so here’s a baseball book that can keep us warm at night. Jane Leavy’s Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It (Grand Central Publishing, 2025) includes many proposals including my favorite: Top off outfield walls with plexiglass 18 feet high (NHL arena style), bringing back a lot more action and particularly baseball’s best, the triple.

Here’s a mix of other Leavy suggestions, sometimes with my modifications: Any pitch over 95 mph is a ball, with one exception allowed per inning. In close, late-inning games, expand pitch clock time beyond 15 seconds, allowing tension to build. Don’t take out a pitcher in the middle of an inning until he’s given up a run. Weekends should feature afternoon games, except for two at night for national TV use. For the benefit of future fans, start night games an hour earlier and give kids 5-12 free reserved tickets for any seat not sold the day before.

Leavy also offers memorable portraits of old-timers like manager/coach Ron Washington. Like a good editor going line by line on manuscripts, Washington demanded hour-after-hour attention to fielding ground balls: “He gave everybody the exact same effort if your number was 98 or the freaking starting shortstop.” Leavy rightly worries about young pitchers pressured into ultra-fastball hurling: Kids had 42% of all Tommy John surgeries in 2023. We have only begun to see gambling problems—total betting revenue from baseball in 2024 was around $1.5 billion—that will lead to more prop bets scandal.

Leavy is also the author of Sandy Koufax (HarperCollins, 2002), a lively biography about a pitcher amazing for both his excellence and his guts: In his last four years, 1963 to 1966, pitching in pain, he won 97 games (including 31 shutouts) and averaged 298 innings and 307 strikeouts per year. (The most workaholic pitcher in 2025 threw 207 innings.) Koufax from 1963 through 1966 pitched 89 complete games. 50 major league pitchers who had the most starts in 2025 had a total of 15 complete games. Those boldfaced numbers are not typos.

Going from the sublime to the deadly serious: Materialism peaked early in the 20^th century as the thinking of Darwin, Marx, and Freud kicked in. It dominated my grad school classes half a century ago. Since then, as the Big Bang has made scientific the Bible’s emphasis on creation, we’ve learned more about the fine-tuning of the universe and the incredible complexity of living organisms.

All that makes increasingly irrational the illusion that the Universe is explainable without a creator God. For a readable compendium of “the rise and fall of materialist thought” through five centuries of scientific discovery, read God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies (Palomar, 2025), published in France in 2021 and now translated by Rebecca West and Christine Jones. For a succinct explanation of how it all adds up, turn to False Messiah: Darwinism as the God That Failed (Discovery Institute Press, 2025) by formerly-agnostic Neil Thomas. 

I appreciate two 2025 Princeton University Press books—one about something important, one about things weird—that did not swing for the fences. Archeology professor Kim Bowes did remarkable research to produce Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent. Information about the ancient rich and powerful is abundant, because writers could make money by doing public relations for them—but Bowes literally dug deep into artifacts to tell the stories of day laborers, slaves, farmers, and even pimps working the gig economy two millennia ago.

Oxford emeritus professor John Blair, author of standard works on medieval culture, writes in his preface to Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World that “intensive work on a subject so remote from my official teaching… had to wait for the luxury of retirement.” He shows how mass hysteria about macabre killings and supposedly wandering corpses is not a luxury item, but common currency in many cultures.

Briefly noted

In the Japanese Ballpark by Robert Fitts (University of Nebraska Press, 2025) takes us to ground level and lower through interviews with not only players and managers but a mascot, a trainer, a cheerleader, a “beer girl,” and ballpark security. Karl Zinsmeister’s Dreamland: A Love Letter to Ordinary America (Mountain Marsh Media, 2025) gives a flavor of the hopes of the 1990s and early 2000s.