A. Bartlett Giamatti

Angelo Bartlett "Bart" Giamatti (April 4, 1938–September 1, 1989) was the President of Yale University, and later, the seventh Commissioner of Major League Baseball. Giamatti agreed to the deal that terminated the Pete Rose betting scandal by permitting Rose to voluntarily withdraw from the sport, avoiding further punishment. He is also the father to the actor Paul Giamatti.

Personal life

Giamatti was born in Boston and grew up in South Hadley, Massachusetts. His father, Valentine Giamatti, was chairman of the Department of Italian Language and Literature at Mount Holyoke College. Giamatti's mother, Mary Claybaugh Walton (Smith College '35), was the daughter of Bartlett and Helen (Davidson) Walton of Wakefield, Massachusetts. His maternal grandfather graduated from Phillips Academy Andover and Harvard College. His paternal grandfather, Angelo Giammattei [sic] immigrated from Italy through Ellis Island around 1900.

Giamatti attended South Hadley High School, spent his junior year at the Overseas School of Rome, and graduated from Phillips Academy in 1956. At Yale University, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon (Phi chapter), and as a junior was tapped by Scroll and Key, a senior secret society. He graduated magna cum laude in 1960. That same year, he married Toni Smith, who taught English for more than 20 years at the Hopkins School in New Haven, Connecticut until her death in 2004.

They raised three children: sons Paul and Marcus are actors, and daughter Elena is a jewelry designer. In the movie Sideways, a photograph of the younger Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti) with his late father is really a picture of Paul and Bart Giamatti.

Giamatti's friend and successor as Baseball Commissioner, Fay Vincent, wrote in The Last Commissioner that Giamatti's official religious view was agnosticism.

Yale

Giamatti stayed in New Haven to receive his doctorate in 1964, when he also co-edited a volume of essays by Thomas Bergin with a Philosophy graduate student, T. K. Seung. He became a professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University, an author, and master of Ezra Stiles College at Yale, a post to which he was appointed by his predecessor as Yale President, Kingman Brewster, Jr.. Giamatti spent a brief period teaching at Princeton, but was at Yale for most of his academic life. Giamatti's scholarly work focused on English Renaissance literature, particularly Edmund Spenser, and relationships between English and Italian Renaissance poets. His work on the genre of pastoral and on the influence of Ludovico Ariosto in England remains influential.

As a teacher of undergraduates, he was well known, and rejected the conventional wisdom that the Renaissance represented an abrupt cultural change, stressing the continuities between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He sometimes referred to the Protestant Reformation as the "Protestant Deformation."

When Giamatti's tenure as Stiles master ended in 1972, he was so popular that his students wanted to honor him with a present. Giamatti told them he wanted a joke gift and they got him a moosehead (from a yard sale), which was ceremoniously hung in the dining hall.

Giamatti served as President of Yale University from 1978 to 1986. He was the youngest President of the University in its history, and presided over the University during a bitter strike by its clerical and technical workers in 1984-85. He also served on the Board of Trustees of Mount Holyoke College for many years, participating fully despite his Yale and baseball commitments.

Baseball

Giamatti had a lifelong interest in baseball (he was a die-hard Boston Red Sox fan). He became President of the National League in 1986, and later Commissioner of Baseball in 1989. During his stint as National League president, Giamatti placed an emphasis on the need to improve the environment for the fan in the ballparks. He also decided to make umpires strictly enforce the balk rule, and supported "social justice" as the only remedy for the lack of presence of minority managers, coaches, or executives at any level in Major League Baseball.

While still serving as National League president, Giamatti suspended Pete Rose for 30 games after Rose shoved umpire Dave Pallone on April 30, 1988. Later that year, Giamatti also suspended Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Jay Howell, who was caught using pine tar during the National League Championship Series.

Giamatti, whose tough dealing with Yale's union favorably impressed Major League Baseball owners, was unanimously elected to succeed Peter Ueberroth as commissioner on September 8, 1988.^[1] Giamatti was commissioner on August 24, 1989 when Pete Rose voluntarily agreed to permanent ineligibility from baseball.^[2] As reflected in the agreement with Pete Rose, Giamatti was determined to maintain the integrity of the game during his brief commissionership.

Death

While at his vacation home on Martha's Vineyard, Giamatti, a heavy smoker for many years, died suddenly of a massive heart attack at the age of 51, just eight days after banishing Rose and 154 days into his tenure as commissioner.^[3] He became the second baseball commissioner to die in office, the first being Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Baseball's owners soon selected Fay Vincent, Giamatti's close friend and baseball's first-ever deputy commissioner, as the new commissioner.

On October 14, 1989, before Game 1 at the World Series, Giamatti—to whom this World Series was dedicated—was memorialized with a moment of silence. Son Marcus Giamatti threw out the first pitch before the game.

James Reston, Jr. notes in his book Collision at Home Plate: The Lives of Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti that Giamatti suffered from Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, an inherited neuromuscular disease affecting peripheral nerves.

Works

• Master Pieces from the Files of T.G.B., ed. Thomas K. Swing and A. Bartlett Giamatti (1964).
• The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (1966)
• Play of Double Senses: Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1975)
• The University and the Public Interest (1981)
• Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature (1984)
• Take Time for Paradise: Americans and their Games (1989)
• A Free and Ordered Space: The Real World of the University (1990)
• A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti (ed. Kenneth Robson, 1998)

See also

Further reading

• Kelley, Brooks Mather. (1999). Yale: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press. 10-ISBN 0-300-07843-9: 13-ISBN 978-0-300-07843-5; OCLC 810552
• Reston, James. (1991). Collision at Home Plate: The Lives of Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti.
• Valerio, Anthony. (1991). A Life of A. Bartlett Giamatti: By Him and About Him.

References

External links

• "The Green Fields of the Mind", excerpt from A Great and Glorious Game
• BaseballLibrary - profile and events
• A. Bartlett Giamatti Quotations
• 8/24/1989 - Rose banned for life