The game of baseball — the team game of baseball — can still feel within reach on a hazy summer night on Cape Cod in a stadium so low-key that its pristine sheen is occasionally broken by kids flopping over the wall and racing across the grass.
But even the Cape Cod League, a wood-bat showcase, is beginning to change, as author Jane Leavy has watched more and more reps demand more and more opportunities for more and more clients. Everybody wants a spotlight these days, after all.
"NIL money and a change in the date of the MLB Draft means it's being used even more as a showcase league," Leavy told FanSided. "If an agent needs a kid to go get seen real quick, send 'em up to the Cape League. I think it was two years ago, Cotuit lost 40 players in one year, because they would come in and then go out."
If even baseball's purest distillation is becoming a series of batter-to-batter sprints, where aspiring hurlers rear back and heave 98 through a glistening sack of NIL money behind home plate, then what hope is there for the rest of us? Leavy's latest book, "Make Me Commissioner," attempts to diagnose and prescribe solutions to MLB's biggest problems, figuring out ways to reinsert "guile" into the pitching lexicon.
Jane Leavy wants chaos back in baseball. Less optimization, more unveiling a hidden pitch the third time through the order.
"Baseball used to tell great stories about guys who figured out how to get someone out the third time around," Leavy noted. "Kept a pitch in a back pocket, they used to say, that they hadn't shown a guy - not just in that game, but maybe in the three previous times they'd faced each other. [The modern game] eliminates the canniness. It eliminates thought. It eliminates challenging yourself and, what's more, it eliminates the kind of stories that that kind of pitching ace produced."
Leavy recalled a tearful phone call with the great Red Sox trickster Bill "Spaceman" Lee, who was appalled the morning after Dave Roberts pulled retiring icon Clayton Kershaw from a perfect game in Minnesota. "The guy didn't get a chance to find out how good he could be," Leavy remembered a sorrowful, but not awestruck, Lee saying.
In the book, Leavy's search for baseball's once-great stories begins on the Cape, and weaves her from the ultra-modern (The MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Driveline's lab) to the non-traditional (The Savannah Bananas, who might just hold the key). While it's difficult to put the 101-throwing toothpaste back into the tube — and, yes, if the Rays keep burning and churning hurlers, they'll turn plenty more arms into toothpaste - the Bananas have at least uncovered the motto baseball should be following as a North Star while seeking its new generation of stories. Namely, it's all about the kids. If you hook them early, you'll have a fan for life.
Leavy has done the math. She wants kids 10 and under admitted to MLB games for free. Start from there, then see how it unfolds. If they can't be on the field, like on the Cape, they should at least be in the stands. As the Bananas say, "Fan First. Entertainment Always." It's a motto that founder Jesse Cole stumbled on while sitting on the bench, bored as an assistant coach on the Cape in Cotuit.
"I watched a pink Party Animal climb into the stands and ask a little boy in West Palm Beach to sign his uniform. Think about the exchange of roles there," Leavy said. "And what that said to that little boy. You're important. You matter to me. And the assistant head coach of the Bananas, who was standing there with me, said, 'That kid just became a baseball fan'."