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, given its creaky foundations. “Baseball is still a nineteenth-century construct, born at a time when pocket watches were in vogue,” Leavy writes in her latest romp through the sport, Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It.

The title made me a bit wary off the bat. While I endorse Leavy as the sport’s next commissioner—because why the hell not?—I’d quibble with the premise that baseball is in need of much “fixing” these days.