If A. Bartlett “Bart” Giamatti had elected to stick to his assigned seating, he would be remembered today as an obscure expert in poetry. No one could question Giamatti’s bona fides within the academy: The scholar, who died in 1989 at the age of 51, was respected for his studies of Renaissance literature and emerged on the national scene during an eight-year stint running Yale University.
Yet the Boston native, whose enthusiasm for the Red Sox led to a seemingly uncontainable ardor for baseball, became known among a decidedly different, and altogether wider and deeper, population when, in 1986, he was chosen to lead the National League. Three years later — the year of his death — he stepped into the shoes of commissioner of Major League Baseball.
Giamatti’s writings about his favorite pastime, gathered in a marvelous 1998 compendium entitled A Great and Glorious Game, reflect a man who managed to meld his head and his heart. In a 1977 essay in Harper’s Magazine on the trading of the gifted and honorable New York Mets pitcher Tom Seaver, Giamatti admits that the sight of the player and his spouse heading out of Shea Stadium “did not immediately remind me of the Expulsion of Adam and Eve in the Brancacci Chapel.” Then again, Giamatti does not exactly back down from the comparison either. “In fact, the reasons for Seaver’s effect on us have to do with the nature of baseball, a sport that touches on what is most important in American life,” Giamatti writes, without strain or sarcasm.
Indeed, throughout his writings, Giamatti effortlessly situates baseball within a larger historical or cultural framework. In a 1985 speech to the Massachusetts Historical Society, he makes much of the green fields upon which the game is played. “One cannot underestimate the power, whether derived from biblical images or classical, of the image of the enclosed green space … on the American mind,” he writes, later pausing to reflect on the appropriateness of the setting of baseball’s very first: a spot called Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. “It is meet and right that this place is the birthplace of our game,” he says, borrowing a phrase from the Book of Common Prayer.
In his most celebrated essay on the game, Giamatti speaks in nakedly personal terms. In “The Green Fields of the Mind,” which appeared in the Yale Alumni Magazine in 1977, Giamatti presents baseball as a kind of suppressant of time, an elixir for those who rue the way the years roll on but also a source of disappointment. “You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive,” Giamatti writes, “and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”
In 1987, in his official capacity, Giamatti denied the appeal of suspended Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Kevin Gross, who was accused of modifying his glove with sandpaper. Where baseball was concerned, as Giamatti saw it, cheating is more contemptible even than physical aggression.
Which brings us to Giamatti’s still-reverberating decision on Pete Rose, whose case landed on the commissioner’s desk when the Cincinnati Reds player/manager faced accusations of betting on baseball. In a statement read to the media, Giamatti spoke with eloquence and rectitude in offering his reasoning for banning Rose from baseball for good. Giamatti allowed for the imperfection nature of all human institutions, but he spoke finally of the special role of baseball “to strive for excellence in all things and to promote the highest ideals.” He added, “Let it also be clear that no individual is superior to the game.”
Baseball, then, would have been poorer without the presence of Giamatti, but it is worth remembering that a career as honestly well-rounded as his is becoming scarcer and scarcer. Earlier this year, Condoleezza Rice was momentarily rumored to be a candidate to take over head coaching duties of the Cleveland Browns: a far-out idea, to be sure, but should it have been dismissed as swiftly and roundly as it was? Just as some of us remain convinced that a real estate background can come in handy in the White House, it is equally clear that a scholar should always have a home on the baseball diamond — or football gridiron.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
