A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI: Egghead At the Plate

Many sports fans believe the Pooh-Bahs of professional athletics — the commissioners, presidents, team owners, the whole briefcase brigade — should play a role similar to background music at the movies. They are doing their jobs most successfully when no one notices them at all. By this standard, A. Bartlett Giamatti, the twelfth president of the National League and, as of next April Fools’ Day, the seventh commissioner of major league baseball, has had a rocky summer.

He was, for instance, the man who suspended Cincinnati Reds Manager Pete Rose for 30 days and fined him $10,000 after an umpire-shoving incident during a game at Riverfront Stadium on April 30. This harsh treatment of Charlie Hustle did not go down well with many purists. Neither did the proliferation of balk calls made by umpires this season, a phenomenon for which Giamatti alone is widely — if incorrectly — blamed. An old rule had been elaborated: with men on base, pitchers now had to “come to a single complete and discernible stop” in their windup before hurling the old apple homeward. Discernible? What kind of pointy-headed intellectual word was that? Not only could you look it up, as Casey Stengel used to say, but a lot of disgruntled fans had to.

Then there was that muggy Sunday afternoon in late July when Giamatti and other dignitaries sat on folding chairs on the infield grass at Shea Stadium. The occasion was a love fest, the official retiring of the number (41) of the Mets’ former pitcher Tom Seaver, a.k.a. Tom Terrific. In the packed stands, goodwill and nostalgia outweighed even the humidity — until the public- address announcer, introducing the honored guests, reached Giamatti. “Boo!” the crowd responded. “Booooooooooo!”

“All people in suits get booed at ball parks,” Giamatti says. He is hunched behind his battered desk in a modest, cluttered office at the National League’s Manhattan headquarters on Park Avenue. “I was gratified by the response. I think it’s healthy.” But there were other suit-wearing guests at the Seaver celebration who . . . “O.K.,” Giamatti concedes, “I am seen as the prime mover of the balk.” And he goes on, somewhat wearily, to explain again that he is only one member of the rules committee, which decided last winter to make pitchers toe the line. Then he changes the subject. “Remember what Seaver did at the end of the ceremony?” After a brief speech, the future Hall of Famer jogged to the pitching mound, the sphere of so many of his triumphs, and acknowledged wave after wave of ovations. “I’ll tell you,” Giamatti says, “that’s one of my all-time baseball memories.”

This deflection of scrutiny away from himself toward the playing field is typical of Giamatti. He is, at age 50, an unabashed baseball freak, an older version of the boy who grew up in South Hadley, Mass., being taught to love the Boston Red Sox by his father, a professor of Italian at Mount Holyoke College. Faithful to his genteel upbringing, Giamatti neither seeks nor seems to relish attention. He keeps his private life just that; Toni, his wife of 28 years, two sons and a daughter are all rigorously shielded from outside prying. It is also true that during his nearly two years as N.L. president, Giamatti has attracted extraordinary press coverage, considerably more during the same period than Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, whom he will succeed.

Not all this ink can be blamed on Pete Rose or balk rules. Giamatti is too articulate for his own anonymity. Sportswriters have learned that Bart, as everyone calls him, will eventually deliver the colorful remark. It may take some hounding. He may try to put them off with a “Can’t talk to you now, guy” or a “Later, pal,” displaying the side-of-the-mouth brusqueness he adopts when feeling besieged. Never mind. Sooner or later, usually sooner, he will relent. Prod him with questions. Why has he been critical of those huge screens towering behind outfield fences in so many parks that now sometimes compete with the game in progress? “Look,” he will answer in spite of himself, “I’m not some kind of Luddite, baying at change.” And then he is off and running. “The screen is the most visible symbol of our high-tech age, and here it is, plunked down in this ancient coliseum. It’s only been around for ten years or so. We need to determine its proper venue.”

Reporters have not as a rule approached other sports executives in pursuit of profundities. Former Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, for example, was seldom sounded for his views on Western civilization. What sets Giamatti apart from everyone else who has held a comparable position of authority in U.S. sports is his background. He once made his living as a professor of English and comparative literature, with a particular interest in the Italian Renaissance. Odder still, he was at age 40 the youngest person in 200 years to be installed as the president of Yale University, in 1978. (Around the time of his selection, Giamatti made a wry, self-deprecatory remark that seems, in retrospect, premonitory, if slightly off base: “The only thing I ever want to be president of is the American League.”)

Giamatti knows that his eight years as head of one of the nation’s great universities will affect how he is perceived now and for the rest of his career. He is permanently stamped as the egghead who invaded baseball. “I’m not ashamed of what I did at Yale,” he says. “I love the place, I was extremely happy there, and I was thrilled to have some control over its continuing excellence and well-being.” Still, if stories about him must be written, he would like to see a few that do not harp on his exotic past, drop names such as Dante or Machiavelli or refer to him as the Renaissance man. “I $ suppose where I came from can’t be ignored,” he admits. “But I am less struck by the anomaly of moving from there to here than others seem to be.”

That perceived peculiarity is double-edged. On the one hand, some Yale alums still cluck over the spectacle of Giamatti’s descent from academic grandeur to the commercial muck of professional sports. If there is a life for former Ivy League presidents, it should be conducted as unobtrusively as possible in a reputable embassy or blue-chip foundation. At the other extreme, certain tobacco-chewing, spit-on-the-hands, belly-up-to-the-bar baseball types wonder what in the hell a gabby professor is doing running a league and, next year, the whole show. Oh, yeah, Giamatti. Whattid he ever hit?

Yet when Bart explains the logic behind his errant pilgrimage, it all apparently makes sense. “Leaving the faculty at Yale in 1978 to become an administrator was the major transition,” he says. “Every teacher who has ever been induced to defect to the other side invariably says” — he pounds the desk in mock emphasis — ” ‘I’m. Going. To. Go. On. Teaching. By. Gosh.’ It is psychologically necessary for them to say that. I said it. But it’s never realistic. What I hope I became at Yale was a facilitator of those who are very, very good at what they do. That’s also been my aim at the National League. It’s what I’ll try to do as commissioner.”

Giamatti obviously means every word of this, but he is hardly the passive, pliable, accommodating technocrat that his self-description portrays. In truth, he has never abandoned teaching; he has moved his impressive pedagogical skills from the classroom into progressively larger arenas. Bart holds certain truths to be self-evident. Chief among these is his unfashionable conviction that individualism must cease when it threatens the legitimate, shared concerns of community. This belief is not a late-blooming flower of incipient dotage. As a fledgling professor during the 1960s, Giamatti bore the plumage of the counterculture. His clothes were rumpled, his hair longish; he sported a goatee and an unassuming, downscale, fist-around-a- can-of-beer manner. Students were attracted by this charisma. They enrolled in his courses and came out of them equally entranced by their teacher, but for radically different reasons. Bart expected them actually to read their assignments. He believed in grades, tough grades; he argued that being a civilized human being is not a matter of instinct but of unrelenting hard work and discipline.

Nothing has changed, except that the stewardship of the national pastime has just been handed to a person who holds and acts upon deep moral convictions. This news, set within the recent annals of executive Americana, is so startling as to be preposterous. Even some of the 26 team owners who on Sept. 8 unanimously elected Giamatti commissioner may not fully understand what they have wrought. Superficially, Bart resembles the six previous commissioners, dating back to the original, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, that craggy plinth of probity who was recruited by the owners in 1920 to restore baseball’s integrity after the “Black Sox” scandal during the previous fall’s World Series. Like them all, Giamatti believes in healthy profits and baseball’s privileged place high above such mundane matters as antitrust regulations.

But his concerns extend well beyond these. He is convinced that major league baseball plays a bardic, mythic role in American society; the long, recurring seasons are an ongoing epic, Homeric or Vergilian or Dantesque, a vital locus of rapt assembly where enduring values are enacted and passed on. “The game is such a wonderful mix between the individual and the community,” he says. “The struggle between the pitcher and batter throws these two isolated competitors into lonely relief. But the purpose of that confrontation is for the team, the benefit of the larger group.”

In the knobby, swampy world that roils below the level of such Olympian meditations, Giamatti is going to face some real problems, and pretty soon. For one thing, two arbitrators have now ruled that the club owners — Bart’s bosses — conspired to restrict the movement of players who had become free agents after the 1985 and 1986 seasons. In lay terms, eligible players were allowed to offer their services to the highest bidder, except that few bids were forthcoming save from the clubs for which they were already playing. These judgments could figure explosively when the contract between the clubs and the Major League Players Association expires after the 1989 season. Also up for grabs next year are potentially troublesome extensions or renewals of network-television contracts. It is easy to dream up a nightmare for the spring of 1990: no games are being broadcast nationwide, but that hardly matters, since all the players are on strike.

Giamatti’s role in this unfolding, inevitable crisis will be under the closest imaginable scrutiny. Some mutters from the Players Association have already accused Bart of being the owners’ apologist. Giamatti is in no mood to criticize the people who hired him. “I’ve gotten to know all the owners, and I think they are a remarkable set of human beings.” He also resists charges of partisanship: “I’m not anti-players, anti-umpires, anti-anybody.” He elaborates: “My responsibility will be to serve, as best I can, the totality of the institution.”

He will be worth watching in the year ahead, as he attempts to protect his vision of a green, Edenic pageant against the clamoring demands of diverse actors, producers, stagehands and unruly spectators. Even those who are indifferent to sports may have a greater stake in Giamatti’s struggle than they realize. The central question hinges on whether collective celebrations should reflect or ennoble their societies. Reflection, these days, means augmented, intensified doses of behavior already lamentably available on the streets: rudeness, insensitivity, the steady thrum of flash-point violence. Bart thinks he has an older, better idea: orderly, considerate crowds in clean, pleasant surroundings, absorbed in a leisurely spectacle performed by happy, fulfilled heroes. How could people exposed to such idyllic wonders fail to carry some of their experiences out into the streets and their own homes? “I am an idealist, a Neoplatonist, I suppose,” says Giamatti. “I grew up believing in values, and also believing we’ll often fall short of realizing them. That training probably led me to baseball. The best hitters fail about 70% of the time. But that’s no reason for them, or for any of us, to give up.”