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Yet when Bart explains the logic behind his errant pilgrimage, it all apparently makes sense. "Leaving the faculty at Yale in 1978 to become an administrator was the major transition," he says. "Every teacher who has ever been induced to defect to the other side invariably says" -- he pounds the desk in mock emphasis -- " 'I'm. Going. To. Go. On. Teaching. By. Gosh.' It is psychologically necessary for them to say that. I said it. But it's never realistic. What I hope I became at Yale was a facilitator of those who are very, very good at what they do. That's also been my aim at the National League. It's what I'll try to do as commissioner."
Giamatti obviously means every word of this, but he is hardly the passive, pliable, accommodating technocrat that his self-description portrays. In truth, he has never abandoned teaching; he has moved his impressive pedagogical skills from the classroom into progressively larger arenas. Bart holds certain truths to be self-evident. Chief among these is his unfashionable conviction that individualism must cease when it threatens the legitimate, shared concerns of community. This belief is not a late-blooming flower of incipient dotage. As a fledgling professor during the 1960s, Giamatti bore the plumage of the counterculture. His clothes were rumpled, his hair longish; he sported a goatee and an unassuming, downscale, fist-around-a- can-of-beer manner. Students were attracted by this charisma. They enrolled in his courses and came out of them equally entranced by their teacher, but for radically different reasons. Bart expected them actually to read their assignments. He believed in grades, tough grades; he argued that being a civilized human being is not a matter of instinct but of unrelenting hard work and discipline.
Nothing has changed, except that the stewardship of the national pastime has just been handed to a person who holds and acts upon deep moral convictions. This news, set within the recent annals of executive Americana, is so startling as to be preposterous. Even some of the 26 team owners who on Sept. 8 unanimously elected Giamatti commissioner may not fully understand what they have wrought. Superficially, Bart resembles the six previous commissioners, dating back to the original, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, that craggy plinth of probity who was recruited by the owners in 1920 to restore baseball's integrity after the "Black Sox" scandal during the previous fall's World Series. Like them all, Giamatti believes in healthy profits and baseball's privileged place high above such mundane matters as antitrust regulations.
But his concerns extend well beyond these. He is convinced that major league baseball plays a bardic, mythic role in American society; the long, recurring seasons are an ongoing epic, Homeric or Vergilian or Dantesque, a vital locus of rapt assembly where enduring values are enacted and passed on. "The game is such a wonderful mix between the individual and the community," he says. "The struggle between the pitcher and batter throws these two isolated competitors into lonely relief. But the purpose of that confrontation is for the team, the benefit of the larger group."