A. Bartlett Giamatti was famous for many things. A scholar of English Renaissance literature, he became the president of Yale University in 1977. (At age 39 he was the youngest president in Yale’s history.) Nine years later, in 1986, Giamatti was named president of the National League, and three years after that as commissioner of baseball — not the usual career path for a scholar but one that accorded well with both his lifelong love of baseball and the ability to lead difficult people (like team owners and tenured professors) that he developed as president of Yale. It was Giamatti’s misfortune to inherit the crisis created by baseball legend Pete Rose’s gambling on games involving his own team. As recounted by James Reston Jr. in his book Collision at Home Plate: The Lives of Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti, the crisis culminated in Giamatti’s painful decision to ban Rose from baseball for life. Perhaps not coincidentally, Giamatti died of natural causes in 1989.
A Great and Glorious Game, a posthumous compilation of various writings about baseball by Giamatti, is a small book with big print — and even at that it’s padded with some marginal works, such as the full text of Giamatti’s 10-game suspension of Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Kevin Gross for attaching a piece of sandpaper to his glove.
But the book contains two wonderful essays that repay careful reading, one of which I’ll describe here. “Baseball as Narrative” compares the game to Homer’s Odyssey and other epic tales of difficult, heroic journeys to reach home. “All literary romance derives from the Odyssey,” writes Giamatti, “and is about rejoining.” Noting that “the concept of home has a particular resonance for a nation of immigrants, all of whom left one home to seek another,” he adds: “the route [home] is full of turnings, wanderings, danger . . .
“In baseball, the journey begins at home, negotiates the twists and turns at first, and often founders far out at the edges of the ordered world at rocky second. Whoever remains out there is said to ‘die’ on base, . . . Often the effort fails, the hunger is unsatisfied as the catcher bars fulfillment, . . . [and] the impossibility of going home again is reenacted in what is baseball’s most violent physical confrontation, swift, savage, down in the dirt, nothing availing.
“Or,” he continues, “if the attempt, long in planning and execution, works, then the reunion and all it means is total — the runner is a returned hero.”
I like that. I also like the essay called “Baseball and the American Character.” Tune in tomorrow.
