6.11.07 Book Blog II: A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti
This entry was posted on 6/10/2007 9:16 AM and is filed under uncategorized.
I have been reading as many books as I can about
Division III sports (there are just a few), about college baseball
(even fewer), and about baseball in general (many). Every once in a
while I will post something in this space about a book that I think is
interesting. Today's entry is the second in an occasional series.
A. Bartlett Giamatti was famous for many things. A literary specialist on the English Renaissance, he became president of Yale University in 1977--at age thirty-nine 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 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 on 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 ten-game suspension of Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Kevin Gross for attaching a piece of sandpaper to his glove.
But the book contains two glorious essays that repay careful reading. One is called "Baseball as Narrative." It 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 flounders far out at the edges of the ordered world at rocky second. Whoever remains out there is said to 'die' on base. . . . And when it is given one to round third, a long journey seemingly over, the end in sight, . . . [o]ften 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, and I also like the essay called "Baseball and the American Character." Once again I quote Giamatti at length.
Baseball "fits America," Giamatti claims. "Above all, it fits so well because it embodies the antithetical, complementary interplay of individual and group that we so love, and because it conserves our longing for the rule of law while licensing our resentment of lawgivers." (Think of how much we value the Constitution and despise the politicians who hold the offices created by the Constitution.)
Baseball "is primitive in its starkness. A man on a hill prepares to throw a rock at a man slightly below him, not far away, who holds a club. . . . The batter is, they say, on offense yet batting is essentially a reactive and deeply defensive act. The pitcher is, they say, on defense yet the pitcher initiates play and controls the game. . . . The individual at the plate takes on, alone, the entire team on the field, including the catcher. . . . The catcher is the only defensive player in any sport I know of whose defined position requires him to adopt the perspective, if not the stance, of the player on offense."
Giamatti fell in love with baseball long before the designated hitter rule was adopted by the American League and, subsequently, by college baseball. He abhorred it and as the NL's president was free to vent his disdain. Baseball "places a tremendous premium on the individual, who must be able to react instantly on offense and defense and who must be able to hit, run, throw, field. . . . The 'designated hitter' is so offensive because it violates this basic characteristic of the game."
A. Bartlett Giamatti was famous for many things. A literary specialist on the English Renaissance, he became president of Yale University in 1977--at age thirty-nine 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 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 on 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 ten-game suspension of Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Kevin Gross for attaching a piece of sandpaper to his glove.
But the book contains two glorious essays that repay careful reading. One is called "Baseball as Narrative." It 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 flounders far out at the edges of the ordered world at rocky second. Whoever remains out there is said to 'die' on base. . . . And when it is given one to round third, a long journey seemingly over, the end in sight, . . . [o]ften 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, and I also like the essay called "Baseball and the American Character." Once again I quote Giamatti at length.
Baseball "fits America," Giamatti claims. "Above all, it fits so well because it embodies the antithetical, complementary interplay of individual and group that we so love, and because it conserves our longing for the rule of law while licensing our resentment of lawgivers." (Think of how much we value the Constitution and despise the politicians who hold the offices created by the Constitution.)
Baseball "is primitive in its starkness. A man on a hill prepares to throw a rock at a man slightly below him, not far away, who holds a club. . . . The batter is, they say, on offense yet batting is essentially a reactive and deeply defensive act. The pitcher is, they say, on defense yet the pitcher initiates play and controls the game. . . . The individual at the plate takes on, alone, the entire team on the field, including the catcher. . . . The catcher is the only defensive player in any sport I know of whose defined position requires him to adopt the perspective, if not the stance, of the player on offense."
Giamatti fell in love with baseball long before the designated hitter rule was adopted by the American League and, subsequently, by college baseball. He abhorred it and as the NL's president was free to vent his disdain. Baseball "places a tremendous premium on the individual, who must be able to react instantly on offense and defense and who must be able to hit, run, throw, field. . . . The 'designated hitter' is so offensive because it violates this basic characteristic of the game."
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6/16/2007 10:02 PM
Bill Flanagan wrote:
"Baseball as Narrative" first appeared in Professor Giamatti's book, Take Time for Paradise (Summit Books 1989), which resulted from the material he first explored during the 1989 Cook Lectures on American Institutions at the University of Michigan Law School. (The dust jacket displays a photo of Fenway Park, taken from centerfield, a subtle reminder that the Commissioner, officially neutral, was an unofficial Red Sox fan.) The book develops Giamatti's argument that "we can learn far more about the conditions, and values, of a society by contemplating how it chooses to play, to use its free time, to take its leisure, than by examining how it goes about its work."
Giamatti poses the question: "Is not freedom the fulfillment of the promise of an energetic, complex order?," and, relating his answer to baseball, explains:
"Clearly I believe the answer is yes, and clearly, therefore, I believe we cherish as Americans a game wherein freedom and reunion are both possible. Baseball fulfills the promise America made itself to cherish the individual while recognizing the overarching claims of the group. It sends its players out in order to return again, allowing all the freedom to accomplish great things in a dangerous world. So baseball restates a version of America's promises every time it is played. The playing of the game is a restatement of the promises that we can all be free, that we can all succeed."
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