In 1986, he shifted careers and joined MLB, first as the president of the National League. In 1989, he became the seventh commissioner of baseball. Giamatti is best remembered for his decision to ban Pete Rose, the all-time hits leader, from baseball for betting on games, a ruling that reinforced the integrity of the sport. Tragically, he died of a heart attack just eight days after issuing the decision, at the age of 51. Giamatti’s legacy spans both the academic world and professional sports.
A. Bartlett Giamatti Quotes
1. “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
2. “Baseball is about homecoming. It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
3. “A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
4. “Baseball has the largest library of law and love and custom and ritual, and therefore, in a nation that fundamentally believes it is a nation under law, well, baseball is America’s most privileged version of the level field.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
5. “For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
6. “Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
7. “Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
8. “No one man is superior to the game.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
9. “There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
10. “Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
11. “Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
12. “All play aspires to the condition of paradise…through play in all its forms…we hope to achieve a state that our larger Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian culture has always known was lost. Where it exists, we do not know, although we always have envisioned it as a garden…always as removed, as an enclosed green place…Paradise is an ancient dream…It is a dream of ourselves as better than we are, back to what we were.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
13. “Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
14. “The banishment for life of Pete Rose from baseball is a sad end if a sorry episode. One of the game’s greatest players has engaged in a variety of acts which have stained the game, and he must now live with the consequences of those acts. There is absolutely no deal for reinstatement.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
15. “The university is our culture’s assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
16. “We have an obligation to spread amateur baseball both at home and abroad. Building up the game at all levels – Little League, Babe Ruth Leagues, the colleges – is in our own self-interest.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
17. “On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti
18. “If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will and imagination.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti