Another Major Loss for Baseball

Angels this day weep, and Padres and Cardinals pray, and Braves feel weak, Giants small, Reds blue.

Now, both Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti are out of the game of baseball.

We thought nothing could be sadder than the banishment of Rose. We were wrong. The commissioner of baseball is dead, felled Friday by a heart attack. May the pennants of 1989 fly at half-staff.

Life begins, life ends. Two days before Bart Giamatti oversaw Pete Rose’s expulsion from baseball, Rose became the father of a baby girl. Ten days later, Giamatti passed away. Such are the days of our lives.

Hard to believe any of this. Hard to believe that Giamatti the graybeard, at 51, was only three years older than the moptop Rose. Hard to believe that one moment a man can step up before the crowd and take his cuts, then be seen no more.

Bart Giamatti was there one day and gone the next. Gone in the snap of a finger.

History books ask us to believe that the day before he was assassinated, Julius Caesar, dining with friends, was asked: “What is the best kind of death?”

“A sudden one,” Caesar was said to have replied.

Perhaps. Perhaps leaders of men should never linger, should die in combat, should spare their followers any undue suffering or anxiety. Mere days after winning his greatest battle, Bart Giamatti collapsed at his New England summer home and, less than two hours later, at a Martha’s Vineyard hospital, was pronounced dead.

He had crusaded to keep baseball “from blemish or stain or disgrace,” to quote the commissioner’s words on the day Pete Rose’s side was retired. “No individual is superior to the game.”

Only since April had A. Bartlett Giamatti been baseball’s commissioner, its seventh. Before that, he was president of the National League, and before that, president of Yale, an educator, a man of letters, a “man of principle,” as Yale football Coach Carmen Cozza remembered him Friday.

Howard Cosell, who taught classes at Yale when he wasn’t in a broadcast booth, called Giamatti “one of the most learned and remarkable men I have ever known, and a great asset for this country.”

How robust Bart Giamatti seemed when he spoke in public, when he shouldered the weight of having to investigate and castigate one of his favorite players in his favorite sport. He never hid, never quaked. Behind billy-goatish Van Dyke whiskers that added age to his face was the voice of reason.

Cincinnati’s faithful, ready to endorse Pete Rose no matter what the cause or who the foe, did everything from hang the commissioner in effigy to vilify him in banner and verse. He became Black Bart to backers of the Reds, a varmint instead of a sheriff.

“Somehow, they turned me into the villain,” Giamatti said one day. “A remarkable act of transference.”

He scarcely had time to enjoy his eventual victory, even though it was the kind of victory, a Pyrrhic one, as a Yalie might choose to call it, that had proved costly to both sides. Kicking Pete Rose out of baseball was not the triumph for which Bart Giamatti hoped to be remembered. It was a sad occasion, not a joyful one.

We didn’t always know what to make of the man. He could be haughty, condescending, imperious. In this respect he was much like the original chief judge of baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who, by coincidence and apropos of nothing, was the only other commissioner to have died in office.

Baseball had need of a sturdy figurehead, however. Bowie Kuhn, rightly or wrongly, had been perceived as a marshmallow, and Peter Ueberroth as a profiteer, a man who did more for baseball’s economy than for its integrity.

Giamatti, in five months, put his personal imprint on the game, as a league president does on the baseballs themselves. Everybody knew where he stood. He had nothing to gain in the Pete Rose affair, and much to lose. He inherited this mess and did so willingly, and knew next that he faced an equally riveting challenge, the potential of a 1990 labor strike that could put his sport in an even more unfavorable light.

“Let no one think that it did not hurt baseball,” Giamatti said of the Rose scandal. “That hurt will pass, however, as the great glory of the game asserts itself and a resilient institution goes forward.”

He was right in every respect but one.

One resilient institution does not go forward.

Baseball’s losses have begun to outnumber its wins.