Many sports fans believe the Pooh-Bahs of professional athletics -- the commissioners, presidents, team owners, the whole briefcase brigade -- should play a role similar to background music at the movies. They are doing their jobs most successfully when no one notices them at all. By this standard, A. Bartlett Giamatti, the twelfth president of the National League and, as of next April Fools' Day, the seventh commissioner of major league baseball, has had a rocky summer.
He was, for instance, the man who suspended Cincinnati Reds Manager Pete Rose for 30 days and fined him $10,000 after an umpire-shoving incident during a game at Riverfront Stadium on April 30. This harsh treatment of Charlie Hustle did not go down well with many purists. Neither did the proliferation of balk calls made by umpires this season, a phenomenon for which Giamatti alone is widely -- if incorrectly -- blamed. An old rule had been elaborated: with men on base, pitchers now had to "come to a single complete and discernible stop" in their windup before hurling the old apple homeward. Discernible? What kind of pointy-headed intellectual word was that? Not only could you look it up, as Casey Stengel used to say, but a lot of disgruntled fans had to.
Then there was that muggy Sunday afternoon in late July when Giamatti and other dignitaries sat on folding chairs on the infield grass at Shea Stadium. The occasion was a love fest, the official retiring of the number (41) of the Mets' former pitcher Tom Seaver, a.k.a. Tom Terrific. In the packed stands, goodwill and nostalgia outweighed even the humidity -- until the public- address announcer, introducing the honored guests, reached Giamatti. "Boo!" the crowd responded. "Booooooooooo!"
"All people in suits get booed at ball parks," Giamatti says. He is hunched behind his battered desk in a modest, cluttered office at the National League's Manhattan headquarters on Park Avenue. "I was gratified by the response. I think it's healthy." But there were other suit-wearing guests at the Seaver celebration who . . . "O.K.," Giamatti concedes, "I am seen as the prime mover of the balk." And he goes on, somewhat wearily, to explain again that he is only one member of the rules committee, which decided last winter to make pitchers toe the line. Then he changes the subject. "Remember what Seaver did at the end of the ceremony?" After a brief speech, the future Hall of Famer jogged to the pitching mound, the sphere of so many of his triumphs, and acknowledged wave after wave of ovations. "I'll tell you," Giamatti says, "that's one of my all-time baseball memories."
This deflection of scrutiny away from himself toward the playing field is typical of Giamatti. He is, at age 50, an unabashed baseball freak, an older version of the boy who grew up in South Hadley, Mass., being taught to love the Boston Red Sox by his father, a professor of Italian at Mount Holyoke College. Faithful to his genteel upbringing, Giamatti neither seeks nor seems to relish attention. He keeps his private life just that; Toni, his wife of 28 years, two sons and a daughter are all rigorously shielded from outside prying. It is also true that during his nearly two years as N.L. president, Giamatti has attracted extraordinary press coverage, considerably more during the same period than Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, whom he will succeed.