April 4
GIAMATTI DAY
What do baseball, literature and Yale University have in common? If you said Angelo Bartlett Giamatti, you would be absolutely correct!
Angelo Giamatti was born on this day in 1938 in the Boston area, growing up in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
Better known as A. Bartlett Giamatti, he was educated at Yale and became a professor of literature at the highly respected university. In 1978 Giamatti became Yale’s youngest president.
Having gone as far as he could go at Yale, the professor, who had always been a Boston Red Sox fan, decided to take baseball more seriously. It was 1986 and Bart, as he was then known, was made president of major-league baseball’s National League. Three years later, Bart Giamatti became Commissioner of Baseball. As Commissioner, he hoped to keep baseball an outdoor game that was played on real grass, "Americans have become accustomed to associating summer’s renewal of the earth and fall’s harvest with baseball. You can’t conceive of baseball being played in the winter. It is fitted to the season in an extraordinary way."
Bart Giamatti’s last role as Commissioner was played out just eight days before his death on September 1, 1989. He gave Pete Rose a life sentence: no more baseball (because Rose had bet on the game).
Those Were the Days, the Today in History service from 440 International
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