Bart Giamatti: A Better Class of People

By Jeffrey Hart | Monday, August 31, 1998

This book, which every literate baseball fan will cherish, contains material of considerable interest about gritty subjects the author faced as baseball comissioner, such as the Pete Rose case and the necessity of disciplining the hooligans in the stands. But it also includes two essays that will be read as long as baseball is played: 'Baseball and the American Character' and 'Baseball as Narrative.'

In 'Baseball as Narrative' Mr. Giamatti writes like this:

Home is an English word virtually impossible to translate into other tongues. No translation catches the associations, the mixture of memory and longing, the sense of security and autonomy and accessibility, the aroma of inclusivess, of freedom from wariness, that cling to the word home and are absent from house and even my house. Home is a concept and not a place.... As the heroes of romance beginning with Odysseus knew, the route is full of turnings, wanderings, danger.... There are no dragons in baseball, only shortstops, but they can emerge from nowhere to cut one down.... Failure to achieve the first leg of the journey is extremely likely. In no game of ours is failure so omnipresent as it is for the batter who would be the runner.... A 'home run' is the definitive skill, the overcoming of obstacles at one stroke.

Before he became comissioner, Mr. Giamatti was president of Yale. Before that he was a professor of Renaissance literature at Yale, before that an instructor at Princeton, before that an undergraduate and graduate student at Yale. When he was called back to Yale from Princeton, he thought he had come home.

As a Renaissance scholar he published work much concerned with themes such as the Garden in both Christian and Classical literature. In his book he notices that in June 1846 the New York Knickerbockers played a game that formalized many of the conventions of modern baseball in a sylvan location in Hoboken, New Jersey called the Elysian Fields.

In the two major essays here he argues that baseball powerfully reflects American history. It is rural in its beginnings, a green field, and, indifferent to the clock, moves to the timeless rythms of rural life.

After the Civil War, baseball gradually developed its major-league form and became an important feature of life in the big cities of the industrializing North. Yet it retained much of its rural aroma, including more than a hint of Southernness: 'Dixie' Walker, 'Pee Wee' Reese, 'Catfish' Hunter. Even in the cities it looked backward to its rural greeness. Football is war, played on a 'gridiron,' not a stylized pasture.

The geometry of a 'diamond' is precise, and many of the details of the game come in multiples of three, recalling the math of the Enlightenment. Baseball reconcilesthe individual (the player) and the group (the team) in the sort of balance Tocqueville recognized in the Constitution. The base runner is alone, but when he comes 'home' he is hugged and celebrated and, for a moment, rejoins his 'family.' Yet danger always lurks: 'There is,' writes Giamatti, 'a whispering, exploding sound to a fastball, a knife-edged danger to a ball smashed at the pitcher.' But Law is supreme, in the form of the umpire.

In 1978 Mr. Giamatti emerged from his classroom and his Renaissance poems and became President of Yale, only to find that there is no Law and no Umpire in that aena.

He suffered his first heart attack during an employees' strike at Yale in which leftist professors he thought were his friends called him a 'facist,' and faculty wives actually spat at him. In the summer of 1989 he had another and final heart attack.

While president of Yale, Mr. Giamatti wanted to escape to the post of National League president, but he was talked out of it by Yale trustee and former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.

The joke at the time was that Mr. Giamatti was the only person in the world who had ever been intimidated by Cyrus Vance. But when the offer was made a second time, nothing could restrain Giamatti. Two years later he was asked to become comissioner of baseball.

He had his revenge. He was once asked how it felt to be baseball comissioner after being president of Yale. He grinned and replied, 'You deal with a better class of people.'

In baseball, unlike the modern academy, there were rules, as Pete Rose found out. Bart Giamatti rounded third base and made it home.

Bart Giamatti: A Better Class of People

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