Even with a pitch clock and automated ball and strike challenges, baseball is a slow, routine game. Teams play every day, and there’s no big event with a Bad Bunny performance to bookend the season.

It has been, seemingly, a lifetime of benign negligence from the Lords of Baseball that drove author Jane Leavy – biographer of Hall of Famers Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth – to write a ...