#sparkchamber 040422 — A. Bartlett Giamatti
The 2022 Major League Baseball season is expected to begin on Thursday, after a player lockout delayed Opening Day by a week. The #sparkchamber sports report debuts today [lol] with this summary: there will be a full 162-game schedule, a universal DH [designated hitter: somebody else hits for the pitcher], and the post-season will be expanded to 12 teams [up from ten in previous years].
In honor of the sport widely referred to as a metaphor for life, we spotlight birthday boy A. Bartlett Giamatti, born on this day in 1938. “Bart” Giamatti was the 7th Commissioner of Baseball, with the shortest term ever, just 9 months — he died of a heart attack at age 51 in September of the 1989 season, his first year of a five-year contract. His brief tenure is most noted for the agreement he negotiated resolving the Pete Rose betting scandal by allowing Rose to retire from baseball in order to avoid further punishment.
Giamatti placed an emphasis on improving the ballpark environment and experience for fans, and he supported “social justice” as the only remedy for the woeful lack of minority managers, coaches, or executives at any level in Major League Baseball.
Giamatti was born in Boston, and grew up in South Hadley, MA near Springfield. He was never an athlete, but developed a lifelong interest in sports, especially baseball [he served as manager of the South Hadley high school baseball team]. He attended Yale, graduating magna cum laude in 1960. He remained at Yale to earn a doctorate degree — his academic focus was English Renaissance literature, particularly that of Edmund Spenser — and became a professor of comparative literature there [from his obituary in the New York Times: ”He’s the best English teacher I’ve ever had,” one student said in a typical comment. “He makes you excited about the subject, even if you’re not.”].
Giamatti served as president — the youngest in history — of Yale University from 1978 to 1986, seemingly on the wrong side of a unionizing effort, and of student, faculty, and community demands that Yale divest from apartheid South Africa. Both positions of note as this post began with a lockout, and included “social justice.” Everything comes full circle, and opportunity does knock more than once. In life as in baseball, learn from your errors and be ready for anything.
Here’s to a well-played season.
1.] Where do ideas come from?
On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way.
2.] What is the itch you are scratching?
For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are retellings of human experience.
3.] Early bird or night owl? Tortoise or hare?
There are a lot of people who know me who can’t understand for the life of them why I would go to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.
4.] How do you know when you are done?
Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the 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 all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.