Word: giamatti
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...