The Learning Curve Jane Leavy
[00:00:00] Albert Cheng: Well, hello everybody. Hope you’re doing well. I just wanna welcome you to a new episode of the Learning Curve podcast. I’m one of your co-hosts this week, Albert Cheng, and this week joining me is Charlie Chieppo. Charlie, what’s up?
[00:00:14] Charlie Chieppo: Well, I’m well, Albert. Good to see you. I’m very excited to talk to Jane again.
[00:00:19] Albert Cheng: Yeah, that’s right. Yep. Gotta bring you back for all things baseball, and looking forward to another episode on America’s Pastime.
[00:00:26] Charlie Chieppo: Really? Absolutely. Absolutely.
[00:00:29] Albert Cheng: Speaking of baseball, I know we gotta start with some news. And in light of our topic for today, I, I’m just going to forgo any education news and give a shout out to the, uh, Taiwanese little league team who won the Little League World Series this past week.
[00:00:46] And Williamsport, they beat the team from Nevada. Was represented, the, I guess the US Sydor, this seven to zero wasn’t too close. It as a kind of a dominating performance by the Taiwanese team. And I mean, I’m, uh, glowing because, I mean, Charlie, I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned to you I’m, I’m actually ethnically Taiwanese, so Oh mean, anything that happens, you know, cool with Taiwan, there’s a lot of pride that Yeah.
[00:01:08] Shows up. So anyway, I was really thrilled to see that. I mean, look, my giants haven’t been giving me anything to cheer about, but it’s nice to see the, the Taiwanese team giving me something to cheer about. 18th title first since 1996. So great to see. Wow. 18 titles. That’s a dynasty. That’s incredible. Yeah.
[00:01:26] Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, we can, we can talk a lot more baseball stories. I mean, I, I mean, look, you’re a Yankees fan and so, so it’s not No. Well, actually I was gonna talk about Ming
[00:01:35] Charlie Chieppo: Wong. Ah, yes. Oh, and not for a freak base. Running injury. I mean, he was a great person, right? Yeah. Taiwan, this guy, and,
[00:01:43] Albert Cheng: and I got to see him play when they were visiting the Oakland Athletics.
[00:01:47] And let me tell you, I, I’ve never seen so many Yankees fans show up at the Oakland Coliseum. Right. All, you know, a lot of them draped with Taiwanese flags as well. So that, I mean, that was a little, little hats hit to your team, I guess. Absolutely. And he came outta nowhere.
[00:02:03] Charlie Chieppo: Yeah. It was amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So good. That was so sad that he got hurt.
[00:02:08] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well, hey, I mean, I guess we do have to talk about some education news maybe. And so speaking of, you know, win the World Series being number one, I mean, you’ve got a different list of rankings.
[00:02:18] Charlie Chieppo: I do have a different list of rankings. Yes. I’m bringing a little, little education to the table.
[00:02:23] Mine is about an article in the Boston Globe last week that highlighted the 40 best public high schools in Massachusetts. Nice. Yeah. Uh, according to the. Infamous or famous, depending on your point of view, US News and World Report rankings. A couple of things struck me about it. One is that five of the top 10 public high schools and five of the top eight, if you don’t count, exam schools are charter schools, and the other is that those five are all schools that didn’t embrace the worst.
[00:02:52] Excesses of this sort of social justice education. The rankings highlight the success of these charter schools, even after charter schools in Massachusetts have really been severely limited after losing a 2016 statewide ballot initiative. So I was really kind of pleasantly surprised to see that they were still doing so well.
[00:03:13] And the second is that the charters on the list are not among the many previously successful urban charter schools that. Had seen their performance fall off of Cliffs and say, you know, curriculum. Deeply rooted in the liberal arts with a social justice approach that holds that, for example, objectivity and urgency are tools of white supremacy culture, and liberal education is elitist and colonialist.
[00:03:38] You know, its proponents assert that schools must address the trauma teachers and students experience from living in a white supremacist society before they can engage in academics. And I think it’s just really an inexhaustible excuse for failure. And to be clear, I’m not absolutely not saying that. You know, all DEI programs are bad or anything like that, but you know, these programs can never take the place of liberal arts education.
[00:04:05] Yeah. Because in the final analysis, if we want justice instilling literacy and numeracy are the most effective ways to promote it, and this ranking is the latest indication of that.
[00:04:16] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Not to mention, you know, the long tradition of asking questions about what justice entails Exactly. Looks like within the liberal arts tradition.
[00:04:25] So, yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that list. I think there’s, there’s a lot to think through. Obviously, you know, like you said, Gabby’s aside with the US News and World Report, the way they do it, but I think there might be something to it. Yeah. And so, so you’ve certainly made a case for that.
[00:04:40] Charlie Chieppo: Well, we got those Wall Street Journal rankings now, so we got a couple, we got a little healthy competition going on.
[00:04:45] Albert Cheng: That’s right. That’s right. Well, speaking of competition, we are gonna have, and I mean, not that Jane Leavy is competing with us, but we’re gonna talk about her new book about how to fix baseball. So I’m looking forward to that. So stick around. That’s gonna come up in a little bit here.
[00:05:17] Jane Leavy is the award-winning author of The New York Times bestsellers, the big fella, babe Ruth and the World He created Last Boy Mickey Mantle At the end of America’s childhood, Sandy Koufax, a Lefty’s legacy. The comic novel, squeeze Play, and a contributor to Driven to Write 45 writers on the motives and mysteries of their craft throughout the summer.
[00:05:40] Her forthcoming book in September, 2025 is Make Me Commissioner, I know what’s wrong with baseball and how to fix it. She was a staff writer at the Washington Post from 1979 to 1988. First in the sports section where she covered baseball, tennis, and the Olympics for the paper. And then writing features for the style section about sports, politics and popular culture on Friday, September 21st, 2018, Leavy throughout the first pitch for the Yankees Orioles game at Yankee Stadium.
[00:06:10] Well, Jane, it’s a pleasure to have you back. I mean, we enjoyed the show with you discussing Babe Ruth, and we’re excited to have you back again.
[00:06:17] Jane Leavy: I am thrilled to be back. I’m really, really grateful.
[00:06:20] Albert Cheng: And yeah, this time to talk about your new book, but just in case we have some new listeners, your New York Times bestselling biographer of several Hall of Fame baseball players, a pioneering female sports writer.
[00:06:31] Tell us a little bit about some of your background and, and really how did you get into this journalist covering baseball so passionately?
[00:06:39] Jane Leavy: My father didn’t have any sons, and my older sister had cornered the market in paper dolls. Somebody had to hang with him when he got thrown out of the house by my mother.
[00:06:53] Because he wanted to listen to Aldi Re Goddess on Saturdays, no Sundays, excuse me, rather than the Metropolitan Opera
[00:07:02] Albert Cheng: That kickstarted it all. But we’re glad, ’cause according to your new book, you’ve got quite a bit of wisdom about fixing baseball, right? So make me commissioner, I know what’s wrong with baseball and how to fix it.
[00:07:14] This is the book we’re gonna discuss. And so you write Eldridge Park, home of the Orleans Firebirds of the Cape Cod Baseball League. Is my field of dreams. Well, why don’t you start by telling us about the Cape Cod Baseball League. Why is it such a special experience for baseball fans and how does it contrast more importantly, with what’s going on across Major League Baseball these days?
[00:07:38] Jane Leavy: Well, the, uh, ballpark in which the Orleans Firebirds Nay Cardinals play is built into a natural hollow in this town where the only seating is where you put your puka down on the hillside to watch the game. And people arrive as much as six hours early to stake out their favorite spot. Patches of lawn with coolers and folded beach chairs, and sometimes just garbage bags and blankets.
[00:08:10] And they’ve been playing baseball there, I think, since 1913. And the Cape League has been around for a long time in several different iterations. The current iteration debuted in the, in the sixties when the NCAA gave it permission to be important. I started going there and taking my kids there when they were little.
[00:08:30] So in the eighties, and at that time they were Cardinals. The major League Baseball hadn’t yet imported the franchises. With Major League monikers to change their names unless they were willing to sell MLB merch. And one of the things I like best about the general manager, miss, who is universally known as Miss Sue on the Cape of the Firebirds, is that she.
[00:08:58] Adamantly refused to shortchange the vendors that had been supporting them for so many years. Mm. So rather than switch to major league merch, they became Firebirds who were of course, a mythical kind of bird. Yeah. But when my kids were young, they could and did wander onto the field between innings to catch fireflies, and it has.
[00:09:23] The idyllic quality that is real as opposed to, for example, of the one manufactured at the field of dreams. Sure, yeah. Yeah. I think I say somewhere that the splintered pine in Orleans is actually. Splintered pine as opposed to the tape that was used by Major League baseball or television or whoever built that set for the field of dream games.
[00:09:50] Cover the walls so that you wouldn’t get killed when you ran into them. And it’s a summer college league in, it’s been the most prominent one for years in which college players and just before they become, go into the draft, I have to learn and have to show their ability to hit with a wooden bat. So it’s always been a very important credential and for kids today who don’t play travel ball or can’t afford to go to endless showcases hosted by perfect game at all, all those corporations that have shown up in recent years to monetize, hitting and throwing by 16 and 17 year olds, it’s a really important place to be seen.
[00:10:34] Mm-hmm. The unfortunate truth is. Much as I closed my eyes to it, it is changing and I somehow managed not to notice the Rep Soto machine set up between the home plate and the pitchers mound that one of the many tracking devices now employed throughout baseball, college and high school, maybe even junior high for all I know.
[00:10:59] I was thrilled when the pitch clock didn’t work the first year it was installed, but there is a change coming for the, uh, NIL, which now permits the portal that permits college baseball players to switch where they play, to go get a better deal, to go get more money and more playing time has meant that.
[00:11:19] What used to be fairly structured, and teams now are shuffling players in and out all the time. It’s hard to build any team chemistry anymore up here. And the technology is, is there, I mean, you know, I the manager though, he’s known as a coach, Kelly Nicholson, great guy. He is been manager and coach since 2005.
[00:11:42] One day he put on a shift and I, after it was banished in, in major league baseball. And I said, why did you do that? And actually I said, a war. I said, why did you do that? And he said, I like to win.
[00:11:56] Albert Cheng: Yeah, I mean, you’re alluding to a lot of these changes that we’ve seen unfold over Major League baseball.
[00:12:02] Let’s talk about some of these in detail and let’s start with just the role of the Commissioner Bardi. He was a late time pay scholar and president of Yale, so he briefly served as Major League Baseball’s commissioner, and he provided leadership during the Pete Rose betting scandal. And then, you know, tragically suddenly died of a heart attack in September of 89.
[00:12:23] Since then, commissioners have mostly represented the financial interests of team owners rather than overseeing the integrity of the game. Talk to us about the commissioner’s role, and I think here the, the ousting of Faye Vincent, but the, the Great Lakes gang is important and just the 35 year governance struggles that the game has had.
[00:12:39] Jane Leavy: Now, i’m not sure it’s only 35 years, but it certainly has evolved into a position that is almost exclusively one of representing the owner’s interests. Marketing the game, maximizing every possible way of monetizing. You name it, they’ll monetize it. For example, that thing about, you know, sell MLB merch or change your name in the Cape League and look, you see, it’s a hard job.
[00:13:10] You’re not gonna please everybody. Everybody. The players, union and players and MLB are kind of like inward Albee parties in a, in a domestic dispute. And they’re George and Martha. Going at each other every six years at the end of the collective bargaining agreement. So it’s no joke, but the sense that there’s any representation of the players.
[00:13:33] If you ask the players, forget it. I mean, Sean Doolittle, who is now a coach for the Washington Nationals, had been a relief pitcher. Told me about a day when they ca, he was still with the A’s and it was when the ball was being examined and reexamined to see whether it had been juiced and why there were so many home runs.
[00:13:54] And he said they came into the clubhouse and there was a printout at everybody’s chair saying, we looked into it. The ball is fine. No discussion, no input from players. Just that’s it. And so. They feel disregarded. The decision in 20 21, 20 22, sorry to ban spider attacks. The sticky stuff that is used predominantly by over large men throwing atlas stones at each other.
[00:14:25] You know, it came. Out of the blue, they were, they were throwing too many no hitters. Why were they having too many no hitters? Because they had purchase on the ball and they had learned how to use what started as a safety thing so they wouldn’t hit so many people. They learned to make use of it to improve spin and trajectory and all those things, but to do it in the middle of the season, which is to say it was late.
[00:14:52] June when players had taught themselves how to pitch with it was crazy and one guy at Glass now is now with the Dodgers. When ballistic, publicly ballistic and he ended and he also went on the injured list because without the spider attack, he heard his arm and they still feel that many pitchers that I talked to still feel that, you know, players on the other end of the conundrum, the batters are allowed to use batting gloves.
[00:15:24] Mm-hmm. You know, they’re not limited to pine tar anymore. They got these batting gloves. Why did the pitchers only have that? Bag on the mound at their feet, and you know, why can’t they come up with a universal substance that everybody agrees on that will make it fair to everybody in every climate, you know, in every major league city.
[00:15:46] And of course the Japanese play with a Preact ball, which is a little bit smaller and lighter than the major league ball, but why can’t they come up with one of those? Hmm. Players really care about that, and there haven’t been as many complaints. I think the humidors that have been placed in every major league ballpark.
[00:16:07] The one I went into in Philadelphia, it looked a little bit like a mini Airstream, and there was this guy sitting there with a a Lucite box showing the proper mudding technique there. There’s one that was un muddied, one perfectly mudded, and one. Over mud in past, and he’s like shrugging, like, yeah, I know I, he’s only been doing it like 20 years.
[00:16:31] But I think that there’s, there’s been improvement since the humidors went into effect, but they still feel, but you still feel that it’s uneven and unfair.
[00:16:42] Albert Cheng: Well, let’s talk about some other trends that we’ve seen. So, major League Baseball, I mean, we, we still call it America’s pastime due to its long history and, and culture significance.
[00:16:52] But in recent decades, other leagues, professional leagues have gained a larger following, right? So I think of the NFL, for instance, 410 million global fans compared to the to Major League baseballs. 170 million. And so again, you know, you’re in the book of Make Me Commissioner. Um, and so give us your insight into like what, what are some of the factors that have contributed to the decline of, of Major League Baseball’s popularity.
[00:17:17] I mean, I, you know, as a kid, I, I remember the, the 1990 lockout, the 94 strike, and some of these types of things.
[00:17:23] Jane Leavy: It was Josh Bell, a very nice, bright guy who plays for a base these days or pinch hits for the Washington Nationals. Right at the beginning when I started working on this in 2021, looked at me and said, it’s the national past PAST, new word time, so it’s also a $12 billion industry, which is not shabby.
[00:17:51] It’s not the NFL, it’s not going to be the NFL, but what it is is a wealthy but unhealthy industry because the economic inequities that mean that the royals, for example, the last several years. Earned 40 40, between 40 and $45 million for their annual tv, local TV rights. Whereas the Dodgers had this billions of billions of dollar deal with Spectrum Charter in la and it’s based on the fluke of geography because way back when.
[00:18:30] In the 1880s when the National League was getting organized for the first time, the guy who wanted to corral all these rowdies into a functioning organization gave them rights in perpetuity to market themselves locally, which meant that whatever they earned in Kansas City or St. Louis or wherever was theirs.
[00:18:57] Mm. So over the course of time. It evolved to, first there was radio. Well, it’s not such a big deal in 21 when the first game was broadcast, or even in 27 when the World Series was broadcast nationally, or even at the beginning of tv, which was still pretty limited, but somehow the development of the cable industry and then streaming came, and people like Pete Rosell were smart, savvy executives.
[00:19:27] Building, you know, the megaopolis of the NFL. Mm-hmm. And understood what was coming. They were visionaries. They saw the money that was coming and how they could profit from it, whereas baseball remained wedded. To its old path. Hmm. And it turns out there’s an economic principle involved in that. And I was informed of this by a great friend and a sports economist, Michael Halpert, who is, works as a professor at University of Wisconsin Lacrosse, and he said, it’s called path dependence here.
[00:20:02] You’ve gone down this road for so long and it’s worked. So why should I change? And the analogy he may was, remember in the late seventies when the Japanese started making small cars and we’re still making houses on wheels. You know, well, should we change? Should we start competing with them? Or should we figure, oh, it’s gonna go back to the way it always was, and they figured it was gonna go back to the way it, it always was.
[00:20:29] So they never resolved what both the NBA and the NFL resolved, which is to say a way to share revenues equally among franchises so that it didn’t matter whether you were in a small market, you still had the same amount of money to spend. Free agents and whatever others, you know, salaries, however you acquired the players.
[00:20:54] So you’ve got in baseball, fundamental inequities. And Roy Eisenhart who ran the A’s for his father, Wally, has in the eighties, you know, was saying to me by May, maybe even by the end of April half, the teams are out of it. You know, they’re not gonna win. They just can’t. And so that’s what I meant by saying it’s wealthy but unhealthy.
[00:21:18] They’ve got a real problem because of course, baseball players are the only professional athletes who are not subject to a salary cap, and where there is no floor on how much a team must spend and there’s no ceiling on it either. And until there is some kind of accommodation made to make it more equal.
[00:21:40] You know, it’s gonna be a long time before the Pittsburgh Pirates fight. Paul teams. Yeah, yeah. You know, show up in the, in the playoffs again.
[00:21:49] Albert Cheng: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, look, I mean, it’s being Paul Skis. I mean, look, I, I’d watched him pitch a gem against my Arkansas Razorbacks here back when they were competing here in the SEC, so that was special to see.
[00:21:59] But, you know, we gotta talk about big data, right? You know, you write, baseball didn’t originate doing better business through Big data, but the publication of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball in 2003. And Brad Pitt’s movie eight years later popularized the efficiency driven approach to business. Baseball’s always been his business, but this felt different.
[00:22:19] And I gotta say, I mean I, I was watching the a’s under Billy Beans Management and those years when he would just pick up folks at a bargain than putting up these teams. That was fun to watch. But talk to us about the rise of big data in baseball. You know, the often Ivy League educated general managers who pioneered its its usage and what’s the.
[00:22:39] General negative impact on the game.
[00:22:41] Jane Leavy: Well, it was Billy Bean who pioneered it, and partly it was out of desperation because after, uh, Roy’s family sold the team and when they went to somebody else who cut their budget tremendously, and so he had to figure out a way. To be competitive and the way he figured out to be competitive was to use numbers to find what they like to call market inefficiencies.
[00:23:07] Places that are undervalued and not sought by other. Richer teams. So the best example, and probably the most famous one, who is a big character in my book and a guy I absolutely adore is Scott Hattiesburg. He was a dead armed catcher playing for the Red Sox and couldn’t throw any more. He had hurt his arm, but what he could do was get on base.
[00:23:33] An on base percentage was not a statistic that anybody really cared about in baseball. It was batting average rbis and slugging percentage, but Scott’s ability to either by walks, lots of walks or by, you know, he had some little bit of power, but he couldn’t get to all fields, made him invaluable in. Paul Podesta, who was Billy Be’s right hand man and is now at the Cleveland Browns calculated after the season was over his first season in Oakland, that if everybody in the a’s lineup had created as many runs as Scott Hattiesburg did.
[00:24:15] The A’s would’ve outscored the Yankees cumulatively that year. Hmm. There’s also something else to be said. You know, Michael’s book was great, and he has a way of seeing a story where other people don’t, but he didn’t put much emphasis on the fact that they also had a great pitching staff. Yeah, right. So Billy gets a lot of credit, but the pitching staff was there.
[00:24:40] So was Eric Chavez. You know that. That’s right.
[00:24:43] Charlie Chieppo: That’s right. Yeah. Jane Charlie Chieppo. Great to have you back. Thank you. So you read that hitters got bigger and fitter in pursuit of power because power paid and pitching elbows tore like tissue paper on badly wrapped Christmas presents because power paid more traffic commuted to and from the injured list than between first and third.
[00:25:03] Can you talk about how the drive for greater use of analytics and micromanagement from MLB and teams, front offices are driving shorter careers and the pictures are exploiting arms?
[00:25:15] Jane Leavy: So what happened is that, and it’s actually, people ask me like, what’s the thing that surprised you most? This is what surprised me most.
[00:25:23] Derek Jeter’s Flip Play. Which yes. Was the reason that the Yankees ended up winning the American League Division series in Oakland after being down two games to none. And this is in 2001, so thousand
[00:25:38] Charlie Chieppo: one. Yeah.
[00:25:39] Jane Leavy: Yeah. So it’s a, a very, it’s nine 11 season. And so everything is in a sort of heightened perspective.
[00:25:47] So what happens is, Mike, you’ve seen, I mean, feature this Mike, you’ve seen is a Yankee starter. Yep. He’s still in the game. Yep. In the seventh inning. That’s right. He’s facing a left-handed pinch hitter who is a slugger. The score is one to nothing. Joe, Tori, the Yankees manager doesn’t twitch. It’s Mike Mina’s game.
[00:26:10] That’s the way he used to think about it. Sure. So Art, how counters with Terrence Long? Jeremy gbi, who, Jason’s brother, who was a big lug of a guy, was on first base. And Terrence Long hits a Titanic line drive that rattles around and goes straight through the on field, bullpen into the corner, bounces off, bounces off.
[00:26:36] You know it’s rolling around in there and Terrance Long picks it up. And Jane Spencer, who was playing right field for the Yankees that day in place of Paul O’Neill, gathers it in and heaves it. Well, Derek Jeter is at shortstop. He’s not in a shift. We didn’t have those then. And from that position in shortstop, you know when you talk about how, why it’s such a key position, we could see pretty much every play unfold before him.
[00:27:05] Had he been in a shift as a cutoff man out in right field or you know, right center field, he wouldn’t have been able to see what was unfolding. So instinct, experience, wisdom, whatever, tells him to get on his high horse. And he charges across the field between the mount and second base, crossing the foul line, his body heading towards the Yankee visiting dugout when he intercepts.
[00:27:35] Shane Spencer’s throw, which is he overthrew two cutoff men, you know, backhands it and then shuffles it to Vge Pasada at home plate to catch the lumbering. Jeremy Dbi, who did not slide, and he’s called out and it’s one of those great baseball arguments. Would he have been safe? Was he safe? Anyway, there’s no replay yet.
[00:27:58] So the umpire is still, you know, an unsold arbiter of right and wrong.
[00:28:05] Charlie Chieppo: It’s like Jackie Robinson stealing home in the 56 World Series.
[00:28:09] Jane Leavy: Right? Exactly. So this play boggles everybody’s imagination. Nobody can believe. That he And how did he get there? Kim Igar was working for the Yankees at the time. He later became the first female general manager in, in Miami.
[00:28:25] Yeah. Said where the bleep did he come from? That was the reaction everybody had. And it turns out they had actually done drills to prepare for such a play, so it wasn’t Oh really? Yeah. And it wasn’t completely out of left field as it were. Yeah. But. What happened was that Major League Baseball was then in the process of developing what was called Pitch fx, the first tracking service that was employed that came into the league, 2007 2008, which showed the trajectory speed, location of every pitch and the guys who were developing this, and the guy who’s still there, Corey Schwartz.
[00:29:08] Came in on the Monday morning game, was on a Saturday night, comes in on Monday morning, and everything they were doing was no longer relevant as far as they were concerned. Their CEO Bob Bauman came in and said, you guys can’t tell me what happened. We need to be able to understand exactly how that play happened.
[00:29:26] So even though Pitch FX profoundly changed the game and gave pitchers a head start in using analytics to their advantage. That play actually in many ways is responsible. It’s the instigator in creating stat cast, which arrives in 2015, and that’s the technology that allows them to say, well, the ball was here, which is on an angle of with such, such degrees from the wall, and they can trace literally where the ball goes from place to place in the field and hand to hand in the field and explain.
[00:30:07] How it was possible for that to happen. So the irony that that was the trigger, a play that couldn’t have been made had there been shifts thanks to analytics, spurred the analytics that would’ve prevented it. Wow.
[00:30:22] Charlie Chieppo: You know, it’s funny, it makes me think it’s a very different game than those first games I watched.
[00:30:27] I remember in the summer of 1966, the NBC Game of the Week with Kurt Gowdy watching Sandy Koufax pitch in his last season. I mean, stuff that it regularly gets discussed in every game. Now you would think. Somebody was having a stroke or you know, speaking a different language. If someone from that time came and watched the game today
[00:30:47] Jane Leavy: is Jim Palmer, the great, you know, Orioles, hall of Famer.
[00:30:50] You said to me what you think we didn’t know about spin. Yeah, they knew about spin, right? They knew about rotation. They, they just didn’t have the science to document Right, exactly which way the ball was spinning and you know, I had the sweepers and this and that. There are some things that are new here.
[00:31:12] The ability to teach this, to use technology, to teach this, to take a a guy with a 90 mile an hour fast fall and turn him into a guy with a 97 mile an hour fast fall. That’s new. The idea that pitchers didn’t know how to change things or move their fingers and pressure points to create different and new spins and trajectories, that’s crazy.
[00:31:38] Charlie Chieppo: Right, right. No, I agree. And of course it seems to me the question is who wins and who loses that 90 mile an hour fastball, which in my memory was a pretty good fastball. Those guys might pitch for 15 years. I don’t see a lot of these 97 mile an hour fastball guys doing that. And when they do, it’s a very special kind of picture.
[00:31:58] Jane Leavy: But, well, we’ve, we’ve read a, a generation of guys whose arms are. Like Christmas wrapping as as I wrote, the stresses on the arm, specifically in the elbow at the ulnar collateral ligament. Are too much for the human arm. Guy named Glenn Fleisig in Alabama does much of the research for MLB on these things.
[00:32:23] And he said to me, if you think, think about the layback position when a picture’s arms all the way back, the way you would see in a still photo of coax. And when it’s moving forward in the joint, it’s moving at the same rate as a car at 65 miles an hour. So the forces brought to bear on the NAR collateral ligament, which is kind of like one of those orange rubber bands about an inch thick.
[00:32:49] They put on lobster claws to make sure they don’t eat you right. Exactly. You get to eat them. It’s not built to take this, to me, it’s astonishing. They last as long as they do, but there’s a huge cost here, not just in the amount of money. That Major League Baseball is spending to rehab these guys and have surgery done on these guys.
[00:33:12] The more, I don’t wanna say more important, but the hidden cost is in the deterioration of a relationship between fans and the players. You have an endless succession of anonymous relievers coming in who then disappeared just as fast because their arms are toast. But you can’t root for a guy if he’s not there.
[00:33:36] Right. And the things that you saw Sandy Koufax do in 66 when he already knew he was going to retire after that season, though he hadn’t announced it yet, are not possible today. When do you think they’ll be the next perfect game? I don’t think you’re gonna see one again.
[00:33:54] Charlie Chieppo: Yeah, I think you’re probably right about that.
[00:33:56] Jane Leavy: 20 strikeout games. Not really. And the problem is that they built a system where all the emphasis is on efficiency. Well, you know, making it run at an optimum amount of energy, extended all the energy. Is into not letting run score as opposed to hit ’em where they ain’t what You’re infielder. Fieldable.
[00:34:25] That’s what they’re there for. That’s what Earl Weaver used pitching contact.
[00:34:28] Charlie Chieppo: Yeah.
[00:34:28] Jane Leavy: So there’s no relationship to pitching great anymore. There are no matchups anymore. Mm-hmm. People used to go to the ballpark as recently as 2000 through what? 2013 To see Kershaw pitch against Baumgartner. Or to see Tony Gwynn have the best of Greg Maddox yet again.
[00:34:52] So those kinds of things were tendrils or threads that ran throughout careers and through baseball seasons and through relationships between teams. Yeah. And they’re gone. So the narrative structure of the game and the stories it always told have disappeared.
[00:35:13] Charlie Chieppo: Right. Well, you talk about this efficiency.
[00:35:17] I’ll put that in quotations and air quotes in Make Me Commissioner. You take readers to drive line at Performance Center in Washington State where players get to improve their production. Over a hundred major leaguers have gone there. 40 All Stars. Five MVPs, four si. Young Award winners. Can you talk about some of the ways that using data and analytics has enhanced the athletic performance of players and benefited the game, or at least in the short term?
[00:35:42] Jane Leavy: It was started by a guy named Kyle Bode, who is actually now a part-time pitching coach advisor to the Boston Red Sox, and who was for a time the pitching coach, running the pitching department for the Cincinnati Reds. Very, very crazy resume and all sorts of skills. Great poker player for example. And he was the, you know, one of those guys when there was a whole community.
[00:36:09] Of Stat Geeks waiting for this pitch FX data, which was either Errantly made available, the, I’m not good with the all the web talks. So I think the URL was unprotected, right? Basically. And somebody smart figured out, oh, we can get all of the Major League data. So all these guys were sitting at home with their computers thinking up ways to make baseball more complicated.
[00:36:38] That one of them was Kyle Bode. And so he was the first one to start working with pitchers and enhancing speed. Teaching velo. Coaching velo. And a lot of his practices are still the subject of great. Scorn among old timers. It clearly works. You know, weight training and growing heavier balls does work. It makes you stronger and you get your vilo up that way.
[00:37:09] The relationship between that kind of training and injuries is something people are discussing. All the time. Mm-hmm. And recently I was listening to a British baseball podcast and suddenly he pipes up and says, well, if these kind of centers like his own, were going to succeed in protecting the elbow, they would’ve done it already.
[00:37:34] Well, there’s a stunning admission. You know, I practically fell outta my chair. Yeah. And they’re looking at a new. Paradigm what Betty Ham would’ve called a paradigm switch to try to figure out a way to change. They use biometrics to measure the way the body moves in space and at what speed and how much stress it can handle, and how much weight it.
[00:37:59] Can bear and all this kinda stuff, but it’s all about, you know, bones and stuff. Stunningly. It has nothing to do with muscles and soft tissue. So that’s, they’re suddenly deciding that they really need to look at something that’s called forward dynamics is what it is. So basically what happened is guys who had been home with their computers figuring out diabolical ways to reinvent baseball began infiltrating major league ranks, including Kyle Bode, who was a very early user of them, and whose idea was, well, why do we have to use them?
[00:38:37] Justifying guys like Scott Hattiesburg, right? Why can’t we use them to develop guys? Like Scott Hattiesburg. So he starts the drive line and it’s all based on the dynamics of bones moving in space and bodies moving in space. It’s called inverse dynamics based in Oak Hart, who was the creator of their batting, either stat driven, data driven.
[00:39:06] Batting program, which was created to counter the incredible success of their data driven pitching program. Explained it to me this way. He said, biomechanical research is based on inverse dynamics, which begins with emotion and capturing the data generated by a swing or a throw, and works backwards from that to figure out the forces that cause it.
[00:39:36] Geez. For the load on an elbow joint, for example. Yeah. The problem is inverse dynamics, intentionally ready, intentionally ignore everything about muscles and tendons in the production of force. Wow, I hear that. And they go, they left him the muscles. So now what Kyle is recommending when he said they were rethinking it and had been working on something for eight years is to use.
[00:40:03] Forward dynamics research to understand what the muscles of the arm are doing in the picture. So car biomechanics only but measures what the body is doing in space that is extraordinary. It’s like, oh boy, now they get it. Okay. So they created a system that works, that wrecks arms, that changes enormously.
[00:40:29] The nature of the game. In the sense that it’s less entertaining. That’s my big problem with analytics. It’s not that they’re not smart, it’s not that they don’t work, they work too well. What they don’t do is allow baseball to be baseball. Yeah.
[00:40:47] Charlie Chieppo: No, you’re so right. One of the things that really struck me in the book was when you talked to Bill James, you know, the founding guru of baseball analytics, and even he says, the game is in danger of drowning in statistics.
[00:41:00] That one caught my attention.
[00:41:01] Jane Leavy: I mean, they call mine too, I assure you. And I was almost as surprised when he agreed to go to a Savannah Bananas game with me and liked it.
[00:41:12] Charlie Chieppo: I’d rather go to an Orleans Firebird game with you, I think. I think that would be even better. But anyway,
[00:41:17] Jane Leavy: name the town name, the date I’ll be there.
[00:41:20] Charlie Chieppo: Right. Alright, so let’s get down here to what we can do about it at, at the end of making Commissioner you right into the breach leaked MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, whose fondest dream is a national broadcast package, like the one that sustains the NFL. He began musing a aloud about selling regular season broadcast as one streaming package for all 30 teams.
[00:41:41] Thereby, uh, vitiating the money monetary. Advantage of the Yankees, Dodgers, red Sox and Cubs. Can you close by offering a projection of where the problems of MLB are heading and what you’d like to see happen to fix it?
[00:41:55] Jane Leavy: Well, in February, Manfred, who was not a stupid man. Decides to announce at the beginning of spring training that for sure we’re gonna have a lockout, a labor, I know a lockout of the players by the owners December 2nd, 2026 at the conclusion of this contract.
[00:42:15] Now I thought, okay, there’s a way to attract fans, right? Tell ’em we want you to come out and see this game. We’re happy that those numbers are increasing. We’re happy that more of the younger generation, a 10% increase in ticket buyers in the coveted 18 to 34 age bracket is showing up. TV’s up double ditched in a lot of ways, but we’re gonna screw it all up.
[00:42:41] By having a lockout in December, 2026, and I’m thinking, what kind of crazy planning is this? Yeah, it’s not like the new union doesn’t know this is coming. They didn’t need to tell the union what was coming. It’s for the fans and that is no way to entice someone to come out to the ballpark. Yes, there is a huge problem and the difference between what the Dodgers earn.
[00:43:08] And the Royals earn from their TV packages. And I went to a couple of really smart guys, Michael Halpert, my favorite economist. Mm-hmm. And Dan Ret, the guy who created rotisserie league baseball to ask them, okay, what would you do about it? And Mike came up with a, what is clearly, uh, absolutely unacceptable to the union, which is a traditional salary cap that would.
[00:43:35] Well, he what Bryce Harper did when Manford went around talking about it, and Bryce Harper almost killed him, right? Yeah, I know it. And my friend Dan, whom I blame for all this because all the general managers today played rotisserie league and fantasy league sports and learned how to mess up baseball by playing it.
[00:43:56] Turning it into a completely offensively driven game in which a throw from the outfield doesn’t matter anymore. I mean, don’t get me going on my Yankees and the World Series last year. That was
[00:44:09] Charlie Chieppo: the World Series last year. Jane, watch ’em every day this year. I, I am, I un
[00:44:15] Jane Leavy: I, I am watching them. I
[00:44:16] Charlie Chieppo: stopped. I can’t take it anymore.
[00:44:19] Jane Leavy: So Dan comes up with a plan that do I think the union will accept this? No. But his plan would be that you have an independent assessor figure out the value of each franchise and the gross value of it, and you cut that number in half and half of it goes to the teams to spend on players, and half of it goes back to the owners.
[00:44:41] The half that goes to the players is cut in 30th, presuming we don’t all now have franchises in Nashville. And was Portland, is it by, I think they’re talking about Heard Portland. I’ve heard Charlotte. Right. Which we all need because after all, we need the talent to be even more diluted than it is. So everybody would start with the same amount of money to spend on players in the off season.
[00:45:05] That sounds reasonable. And in Dan’s formulation. Rather than the owners each getting the same amount, it would be weighted so that the teams like the Dodgers and the Yankees who have invested more in a franchise in order to get the greater profits. Would be rewarded for that by a disproportionate, that’s a negative way to say it, but, uh, more shares of the total loot.
[00:45:34] And that sounds like a good deal to me. Mm-hmm. But do I think the owners are gonna accept it? No, I don’t think they’re to accept it. Right. I I mean, do I think the players are gonna accept it? No, I don’t think the players are gonna accept it. So they have had revenue sharing, and that’s the oddity since the end of the 94 95 strike and that it was the 96 CBA where the rich teams support the poor teams in what’s called the luxury tax.
[00:46:02] Yeah.
[00:46:02] Charlie Chieppo: That’s where the luxury tax money goes, right? Right. Yeah.
[00:46:05] Jane Leavy: It’s, and that was, that’s a very nice idea, except that. Not all of the owners who received luxury tax money did what was required of them. It was required to spend on players. Guess what? They didn’t all do that. A lot of them pocketed it and weren’t penalized, and there’s still grievances out there.
[00:46:27] One reason the A spent money this winter was they were really about to get themselves in trouble over not spending their CDA money. So if we said you have to have a total spending of 120 to 130 million and go from there. And if Steve Cohen wants to buy the World Series by, you know, giving, oh, I don’t know who’s gonna be next, next year.
[00:46:53] Who’s gonna be the most expensive guy next year? I know Kyle Tucker. I don’t know. No Roki Tucker. Maybe it’ll be a pitcher. Yeah. Anyway. If he wants to give them $900 million instead of the seven 50 that Soto got. Yeah. Go with God. You got it. Spend it. Yeah. Rich people don’t like being told they can’t spend their own money.
[00:47:17] Yeah. So what you’re going to pay and you’re gonna pay a lot more. Than you currently do in luxury taxes. And if you are the recipient of luxury tax money and you don’t spend it in the way that it is mandated, guess what? You’re not gonna get any anymore. First strike. Yeah, you don’t get any. The next year.
[00:47:40] Second strike, you lose draft picks. Third would be you reduce your 40 man roster down to 35. Man roster.
[00:47:49] Charlie Chieppo: Wow. That’s interesting. Geez. Okay. Well, Jane, I can tell you I could talk about this all day, but would you be willing to maybe end by reading a paragraph length passage from Make Me Commissioner close out the interview?
[00:48:03] Jane Leavy: I’d be delighted to. I. I hope that people get a giggle out of this. I would like to be commissioner, but I, I don’t really think it’s gonna happen. Um, well, the game is worse for it, but baseball, thank you. But baseball has an important job to do here the way it went in whole hog on data offers a lesson to all of us.
[00:48:29] That my friend Hel, who created the sports analytics lab at MIT, yes, shared with me, our lives are being run by AI and by analytics. We may not recognize the extent to which or the specifics, but they are, and it’s only going to get worse. So she said baseball is a canary in the coal mine. A warning of what happens if we are not vigilant.
[00:48:58] About the degree to which data determines how we live, how we spend money, how we build a baseball team, and abandon what the players like to call now the human element. And she said to me, there’s a warning built into the data. If you have a phone, the amount of data your phone is collecting about you is.
[00:49:21] Unprecedented and subsets of that data are going to different entities, and those different entities are using the same kind of algorithms that baseball does to make decisions that have global impact. We’re going to face a crisis about what we’re going to do with this deluge of data. So baseball may be the canary in the coal mine.
[00:49:45] It is shown the tempting fruit of analytics. Athletes running faster, throwing harder, hitting further. But also what happens if we forget that baseball is bigger than that, we’re losing the forest because we’re only tending to a few trees, the ones we can measure.
[00:50:06] Charlie Chieppo: Well, that is beautiful, Jane, thank you so much.
[00:50:08] That’s really a perfect closing.
[00:50:11] Albert Cheng: Yes. Thank you, Jane. That was such a fitting and I mean, this is an education podcast too, and I think that quote definitely applies to how we think about education, education policy as well.
[00:50:21] Jane Leavy: Can I offer you one more bmo? Yeah, sure.
[00:50:24] Albert Cheng: Yes.
[00:50:25] Jane Leavy: Because it goes with that. You’ve got this yawning gap now between people in the game, mostly old timers who are feeling completely.
[00:50:36] Dismissed and who don’t think their wisdom and experience mean anything, and that it’s all been sacrificed to the latest algorithm, which is not just a problem in baseball. Look around at who’s been fired recently. The scientists who’ve been working on cancer research and solutions, you know, their wisdom and experience isn’t worth anything anymore.
[00:51:01] Charlie Chieppo: Yeah.
[00:51:01] Jane Leavy: So I went to Dusty and I said, what happened to empiricism? On the diamond and he says it means nothing. Jane, it’s unbelievable. They try to sell me some BS and I’m saying, that ain’t what my eyes tell me. And their next comment is, your eyes will lie to you. So the complete degradation of the importance of a 50 years in baseball.
[00:51:34] Yeah. He’s not only seen it all, he knows what he’s looking at.
[00:51:38] Charlie Chieppo: Yeah.
[00:51:39] Jane Leavy: And that has to have a role. Yeah. In cancer research and in managing a baseball team. Well, it seems like common sense, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s
[00:51:48] Charlie Chieppo: amazing that you even have to say that.
[00:51:50] Jane Leavy: Yeah, exactly Right. I’d love me some, dusty. Those people I’ve said, he’s just, he’s the most human human.
[00:52:00] I knew, you know, I’ve known in the game and just a wonderful man who he was taking his son Darren, on a ride in a convertible in Vancouver and the kids on his phone and you know, dusty marks at him like the Marini once was, put that machine down, reminded me of my mother saying, turn off the idiot box.
[00:52:22] Charlie Chieppo: There you go.
[00:52:25] Jane Leavy: So he puts down his machine and just as he does, an eagle swoops in over their convertible. Ah. And Darren says to his dad, dad book, and Dusty said, thank God for that moment.
[00:52:42] Charlie Chieppo: Oh yes. Oh my God. To communicate can relate to that.
[00:52:47] Jane Leavy: Yeah. So just ’cause you’re old doesn’t mean you’re that stupid.
[00:52:51] Right. Amen into that.
[00:52:54] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jane, for sharing that. So.
[00:53:13] Well, Charlie, I mean, it’s always fun to kind of join you and sit down to talk baseball and of course to even talk baseball with Jane Leavy. I mean, look, she, she’s light years ahead of us. So fun to, to listen to that.
[00:53:26] Charlie Chieppo: I’ve decided that having a beer and sitting with Jane at an or Orleans Firebirds game is now on my bucket list.
[00:53:34] Albert Cheng: Yeah, that’s good point. I mean, it’d be a real treat to, to actually sit down and watch a game with her. That’d be fun. You know, maybe we need to do some kind of special episode, you know, recorded live A vlog, a fog? Yeah. Or, or, or, you know, I mean, what to figure this out, but you heard it here first. Maybe a special learning curve podcast episode at a baseball stadium during a game.
[00:53:57] Well, thanks for joining though. Still wanna forget to Thank you, so always a pleasure to have you be on the show with us. Thank you. Let me leave you with the tweet of the week and this week’s tweet comes from the 74 million support for phone bans in schools is growing, but. Is it enough to help kids? And so I think this is a hot topic these days.
[00:54:17] You know, we’re seeing lots of schools and school districts, states enact new policies to ban cell phones, and so the jury is out on whether this works. I think we’re hearing mixed stories, lots of positive accounts of this, and then some folks raising some concerns too. So check out this article at the seven 4 million, I think it’s just the latest coverage on this topic.
[00:54:39] And then not to leave you hanging. But next week’s episode we’re gonna have John Kirtley, founder and chairman of Step Up for Students and Chairman of the Florida School Choice Fund to join us. So friend of ours, friend of the show. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re gonna have it at a baseball stadium, Charlie.
[00:54:55] No, not next week. If we change that last minute, you know, maybe we can get you back on, uh, we still get another month. That’s right. Well, anyway, everyone, thanks for joining us. Hope you enjoyed the show and hope you join us next week. Hey, it’s Albert Cheng here, and I just wanna thank you for listening to the Learning Curve podcast.
[00:55:14] If you’d like to support the podcast further, we’d invite you to donate to the Pioneer Institute at pioneerinstitute.org/donations.
