Bart Giamatti Biography by Baseball Almanac

Commissioner Bart Giamatti Biography

Bart Giamatti was born on April 4, 1938 and started serving as the Commissioner of Major League Baseball on September 8, 1988. Less than one year later, his reign as commissioner ended when he died of a heart attack at only fifty-one years old. Baseball Almanac is pleased to present our Commissioner Bart Giamatti biography.

"It has long been my conviction that we can learn far more about the conditions, and values, of a society by contemplating how it chooses to play, to use its free time, to take its leisure, than by examining how it goes about its work." - Bart Giamatti in Take Time for Paradies (1989)

Birth Name:	A. Bartlett Giamatti	Bats:	n/a
Born On:	04-04-1938	Throws:	n/a
Born In:	Boston, Massachusetts	Height:	Unknown
Died On:	09-01-1989	Weight:	Unknown
Died In:	Matha's Vineyard, Massachusetts	First Game:	n/a
College:	Yale University	Last Game:	n/a
Nickname:	None	Draft:	n/a

After being successfully elected to replace the immensely popular Peter Ueberroth, A. Bartlett Giamatti was responsible for reorganizing the administrative roles and duties in Major League Baseball. Giamatti, like Frick, had a strong background in journalism that ultimately helped him to deal with the ongoing pressures of media relations.

After receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in English (magna cum laude) from Yale University, Giamatti went on to receive his Ph.D. from Yale in Comparative Literature in 1964. Following graduation, he obtained a position as an instructor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, but later returned to Yale to join the faculty as an assistant professor of English. He became a full professor in 1971 and served as the director of the Division of Humanities from 1975-1978. In July of that year, he achieved the ultimate award from his Alma Mater after being elected the president of the university where he served for ten years. In 1986, he was named the 12th president of the National League.

After his unanimous election to the position of Major League Baseball Commissioner, Giamatti reorganized the administration by creating a deputy commissioner position in which he appointed Fay Vincent to fill. Perhaps the most famous issue handled by Giamatti in his short career was the agreement with Cincinnati manager and baseball's all-time hit leader Pete Rose that resulted in a lifetime suspension on August 23, 1989. The agreement came after a lengthy investigation and court battle regarding gambling by Rose. (A charge that he continued to deny until 2004.)

Unfortunately, Giamatti's legacy was cut short after he died of a heart attack at his summer home in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts in 1989.

Bart Giamatti Biography

Did you know that Baseball Almanac has a comprehensive biography on file for every Commissioner of Major League Baseball? Take a moment, review each biography, and learn more about the men who have actually been called the "Second Most Powerful Men in America".

Bart Giamatti was in office less than six (6) months before he passed away and during that time he vocalized his dislike for interleague play, had early semi-effective dealings with the Player's Union and banned a superstar from the game / future enshrinement into the Hall of Fame.

The leader of the Player's Union at the time was Marvin Miller, who did not like Giamatti and wrote in his autobiography, A Whole Different Ball Game (1991), the following excerpt, "Like a Pope who died after just a few weeks in office, Giamatti has almost taken on the aura of sainthood; a philosophic scholar who descended on baseball from some higher level — or at least a higher level than most of the newspaper and magazine writers who quoted his pretentious, overripe prose with awe, without bothering to figure out the content of his precious emissions."