Baseball Czar Giamatti Dies of Heart Attack

Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, an authority on Renaissance literature and a man who could discuss Dante and the infield fly rule with equal ease, died Friday of an apparent heart attack while vacationing in Edgartown, Mass. He was 51.

Giamatti’s five-month tenure as baseball’s seventh commissioner was marked by an investigation into the alleged gambling activities of Cincinnati Reds manager Pete Rose, who received a lifetime suspension from Giamatti only nine days ago.

A former president of Yale University, Giamatti was stricken in mid-afternoon at his cottage on Martha’s Vineyard.

State police responded to a call from his son, Paul, and found Giamatti unconscious and in full cardiac arrest, officer Byron Rizos said.

“CPR was initiated but there was no response,” Rizos said.

Giamatti was taken by ambulance to Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 4:32 p.m., “after all-out efforts to resuscitate him failed,” Matthew Stackpole, the hospital’s director of development, said.

Giamatti, a chain smoker who once said that cigarettes were his primary vice and who resisted the efforts of a number of baseball owners who tried to get him to quit smoking, had left New York Friday morning to spend the Labor Day weekend on the popular vacation island.

“I dropped him off at noon on Martha’s Vineyard and he seemed fine,” deputy commissioner Francis T. Vincent Jr., who traveled to New England with Giamatti, said. “This is a tremendous shock. He was a uniquely talented man who had great friends and admirers. It’s a serious loss for the country, the sport and his family.”

Bush Cites His Friendship

President Bush, vacationing in Kennebunkport, Me., said he had been a close friend of Giamatti’s for many years and recently talked with him to express his admiration for the high standards Giamatti brought to the Rose case.

“I just want to pay my respects,” Bush said. “He was a great person. He loved the game of baseball and in a short time made a real contribution to the game, standing for the highest possible ethical standards.”

Giamatti had spent two years as National League president before being elected to a five-year term as commissioner in a unanimous vote of the 26 baseball owners Sept. 8, 1988.

He succeeded Peter V. Ueberroth on April 1 of this year. He is the first commissioner to die in office since Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who died Nov. 25, 1944.

Like Giamatti, Landis made his mark with a lifetime ban, suspending Shoeless Joe Jackson and seven other members of the infamous Chicago Black Sox for allegedly accepting money to fix the 1919 World Series.

The Rose investigation--which concluded with Giamatti saying no one person is bigger or more important than the game--dominated Giamatti’s tenure, shorter by three years than any of his six predecessors.

Atty. Robert A. Pitcairn Jr., in a statement issued Friday on Rose’s behalf, said that Rose was “deeply saddened” by the news of Giamatti’s death.

“In spite of their dispute, Pete had great personal respect for the commissioner. He extends his deepest sympathy to Commissioner Giamatti’s family.”

Rose, before agreeing to the terms of his suspension, contended that Giamatti had prejudged his case and sought an injunction that would have prevented the commissioner from ruling on it. The long dispute was believed to have created stress for Giamatti, but he denied that in a recent interview.

“While it’s a serious matter, it doesn’t take up that much of my time,” he said. “Most of my time, 80 to 90% of it, is spent on other things. The way it’s been played (by the media) would make you think that I’ve been sitting here all day worrying about it, but that hasn’t been the case for months.”

Baseball’s rules provide for the Executive Council, made up of the two league presidents and eight club owners, to carry out the commissioner’s duties until a successor is chosen. An owners’ meeting, previously scheduled for Milwaukee Sept. 13-14, will now focus on that objective, a spokesman for the commissioner’s office said.

Seen as Candidates

Among those likely to receive consideration, baseball sources said, are American League president Bobby Brown, National League president Bill White, Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig, New York Mets president Frank Cashen, Oakland Athletics vice president Sandy Alderson and deputy commissioner Vincent, whose position was created in a reorganization of the commissioner’s office by Giamatti and whose presence provides the sport with an executive who is familiar with the workings of the office until the Executive Council makes an interim selection.

Vincent, a longtime friend of Giamatti’s, is an attorney who formerly was chairman and chief executive officer of Columbia Pictures Industries Inc., as well as senior vice president of the Coca-Cola Company and president and chief executive officer of Coca-Cola’s entertainment business section. He served as a liaison to Giamatti on the Rose case and heads the commissioner’s corporate, licensing and broadcasting divisions.

The reorganization of the commissioner’s office seemed to be a reflection of Giamatti’s multifaceted ability and interests.

Strong Ties to Boston

Angelo Bartlett Giamatti was born in Boston on April 4, 1938. His father, Valentine, was a literature professor at Mt. Holyoke College and an avid Red Sox fan, Giamatti recalled in an interview.

“I was probably 7 or 8 years old when my father and uncle took me to my first baseball game,” he said. “I’d been listening on the radio often enough, but going to Fenway Park, I just was astonished at the whole thing.”

The memory and the loyalty stayed with him. He often wore a Red Sox cap and carried a transistor to listen to the team’s games while serving as Yale president. He grew up with the romantic’s view that baseball is best played on grass in the afternoon, but he lacked the talent to play it himself and gravitated to literature like his father.

He received a BA degree in English from Yale in 1960 and a Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1964. He taught Italian and comparative literature at Princeton before returning to Yale in 1966. He became a full professor there at 33 and director of the Division of Humanities at 37.

He was elected president of the university in 1978--the youngest in two centuries--and served for nine years, providing Yale with its first balanced budget in a decade and ultimately healing the wounds of his admittedly hard-line stance in the face of a 1984 strike by clerical and technical workers.

“He gave of himself magnificently as a teacher, scholar and leader,” Benno C. Schmidt Jr., Giamatti’s successor at Yale, said Friday. “This university will be a better place because of his service. He will never be forgotten here.”

Giamatti, throughout his academic career, wrote a number of books, essays and articles on Renaissance literature, but he also wrote about baseball, which attracted the attention of the game’s owners and executives. He became the 12th president of the National League on Dec. 11, 1986, and said:

“Dante would have been delighted.”

He added at the time that “people of letters have always gravitated to sport” and that he had long found baseball to be “the most satisfying and nourishing of games--outside of literature, of course.”

2 Schools of Thought

When asked what his colleagues at Yale thought about his decision to become a baseball executive, Giamatti laughed and said: “One group thought it was nifty. The other thought it was the ultimate proof of my essential unsoundness.”

In a sport that holds the lexicon of the clubhouse sacred, Giamatti displayed wit, literacy and a youth’s affection for the game.

“The prism through which I see things is the prism that understands baseball is an enormously important American institution with long and deep roots whose purpose is to provide pleasure and fun for the American people, and whose integrity and authenticity are essential in order to provide that pleasure,” he said in a recent interview.

“The pace of the game allows for rumination even at the moment instead of just in retrospect,” he added. “And it is a game with a history and mythology so intimately connected to America that in some idealized and mythological sense it is virtually synonymous with America.”

With the owners facing difficult negotiations on a new collective bargaining agreement when the 1989 season ends, Giamatti’s style, his grass-roots approach, was seen as a possible healing influence on the labor unrest of the corporate-oriented Ueberroth years. The owners were fined $10.5 million by arbitrator Tom Roberts on Thursday for violating the bargaining agreement by acting in concert to restrict free-agent movement during the winter of 1985-86, one of three collusion grievances filed by the Major League Players Assn. during Ueberroth’s tenure.

Ueberroth Pays Tribute

“Baseball has been deprived today of the services of its finest commissioner in history,” Ueberroth, vacationing in Paris, said in a statement released through his Newport Beach, Calif., office. “Bart Giamatti encompassed everything that is good and enduring about America’s favorite pastime. For this man of words, courage and deeds . . . no words can express the loss.”

Said New York Yankee owner George Steinbrenner: “We’ve lost a true Renaissance man. Any other commissioner will be pale by comparison. He was brilliant. He was compassionate. He cared for the game and cared for its people.”

On the day that he replaced Ueberroth as commissioner, Giamatti said that his lifelong objective had been to become American League president so that he could receive a pass to Fenway Park. Flags at the fabled Boston stadium flew at half-staff after Giamatti’s death.

Among his survivors are his wife, Toni, sons Paul and Marcus, and a daughter, Elena. Funeral arrangements were pending.

Staff writer Josh Getlin contributed to this story from Martha’s Vineyard.

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