Word: giamatti
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...
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...