SABRcast with Rob Neyer: Jane Leavy (Episode #26)

September 23, 2019/by Jason Best

Baseball fans, tune in this season to SABRcast with Rob Neyer, a new weekly podcast hosted by award-winning author and longtime SABR member Rob Neyer. SABRcast will feature insights and analysis of what’s happening in modern baseball on and off the field, plus compelling interviews with figures from around the game — and music from The Baseball Project.

Subscribe to SABRcast on your favorite podcast networks, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play, and listen to each episode as soon as it’s released.

Neyer is a longtime baseball writer and editor for ESPN.com, SB Nation, and FoxSports.com. He began his career as a research assistant for groundbreaking baseball author Bill James and later worked for STATS, Inc. He has also written or co-written seven baseball books, including The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers (with Bill James), winner of the Sporting News/SABR Baseball Research Award, and most recently Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game, winner of this year’s CASEY Award.

Current Episode

Episode #26: September 23, 2019

Our guest this week is Jane Leavy, author of The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, which won SABR’s Seymour Medal in 2019. Her previous two baseball books were both New York Times bestsellers, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood and Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy. She also wrote the comic baseball novel, Squeeze Play, and was an award-winning sportswriter and feature writer for the Washington Post.

Click here or press play below to listen to Episode #26:

What’s Rob reading this week?

“High and Tight: The Pace of Play in Triple-A”
By Lucas Apostoleris, Baseball Prospectus

A few weeks ago, Lucas mused on left-handed specialists and their role in major league baseball moving forward, given the expected implementation of the “three-batter-minimum” rule at the game’s highest level next season. While the rule changes would seem to impact the “LOOGYs” more than they would any other specific type of player, that’s simply a byproduct of the real goal of Major League Baseball: increasing the pace of play, which has been a talking point of MLB over the past five years. Clearly, MLB is worried about the prospect of waning fan interest due to a slow on-field product, as commissioner Rob Manfred has made a point to address such concerns. Here’s a brief rundown of the recent steps MLB has taken to try to speed up the game.