Giamatti Aims to Keep Baseball Safe, Pleasant for Fans

Bowie Kuhn was patrician. He was a starched shirt in a corporation lawyer’s gray suit. He said he’d worked in the scoreboard in old Griffith Stadium, but he never got the point across.

Peter Ueberroth was a businessman. He was from California and he came East to do business. It didn’t matter quite so much whether he was managing the business of baseball or the Olympics or whatever as whether he marketed it well.

A. Bartlett Giamatti is a 51-year-old baseball fan in the commissioner’s office, since Saturday. He is a rumpled suit with a trace of lunch on his necktie and a love of the game on his sleeve. That’s not to say that he’s a man of the people any more than you could call the president of Yale “Joe College,” but he likes being called Bart.

Here is a commissioner who is concerned with the same things I am: Boo Ferris and the fear that the ballpark will become too unpleasant for my daughter to go watch Boo Ferris.

Giamatti can mix the sesquipedalian with the blunt -- and will. He can dismiss minor issues as minor issues. He can deal with greater issues with a sense that they, too, will pass -- because of what Kuhn and Ueberroth were able to do. Giamatti established his own willingness for difficult issues with his heavy suspension of Pete Rose for assaulting an umpire last season. And he can get down to the real issue of baseball -- and all spectator sports today -- which is the danger that the pleasure of the game will be drowned in alcohol and battered by barbaric hordes.

If there is a players strike, it will come to an end. Expansion will be resolved. But what if they gave a baseball game and nobody wanted to come? That’s the real issue of “the good of the game.”

“All these issues finally converge in the ballpark,” he said recently. “If people don’t find it pleasurable to go to the game, then all the fancy talk is for naught.”

He has found it pleasurable to go to the game as long as he can remember -- and before. “I grew up obviously before teevision,” he said, “in a tiny town in the country in Massachusetts where the only thing you did in the summertime was listen to the Boston Red Sox on the radio, played baseball and you rode your bike, and that was it.”

He went to his first ballgame with his father and his uncle. It was Fenway Park, about 1945, and Boo Ferris was pitching. “I mean I had just not seen anything like that,” he said. “I was seven or eight years old and all the rest comes out of that.

“I was just astonished. You listen to the radio as a little kid and when you get there, it seems huge and it seems more than you can absorb. That guy on the mound, kind of superior, that figure on the mound by himself, kind of heroic. I remember feeling as if I were gaping, feeling overwhelmed.”

The figure on the mound could have been Joe Hatten or Spud Chandler or Dave Koslo or Roger Craig for any of us. The feeling was the same. But what of the drunken lout in the row behind you who pours beer on your father or spews obscenity on your daughter or takes a swing at you because you’ve dared to root for the Pirates?

If the game becomes a television game, if the stadium becomes a studio, then the game ceases to exist.

The language of lockout is an issue in contracts today and the threat of a strike for next season looms darkly. Why doesn’t the commissioner do something about it?

Once, when Giamatti was president of Yale, he wrote a letter to Marvin Miller, director of the players’ association, warning that there must not be a strike. Neither the owners nor the players altered their course and there was a long, painful strike.

Not long afterward Giamatti was in the midst of an equally painful strike at Yale.

Out of that, he said, came an understanding. “All the thunderbolt-hurling mythology to the contrary,” he said, “this job is basically suasion. You do a little publicly and a great deal privately.”

Giamatti is without the original sin of collusion, in the players’ eyes, but the mistrust on both sides is clear to him. He must try to soften the hard lines. But the commissioner has never sat at the negotiating table and he cannot order the sides to sit with him. “The power of the good of the game was not intentioned to override the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board),” he said.

Obviously, it’s in the self-interest of player and management to get together without a strike, but then it always is until they decide they won’t. “I am not going to do anything to stop a baseball strike, if both sides are intent on having a strike,” the commissioner of baseball said. And that’s a fact of life. The players do not share in the selection of the commissioner and the owners, who do select him, cede just so much of their power to him.

What pressure he can exert comes from his personality and from the fact that the owners knowingly selected a man with strong intellectual and moral standing.

And then there’s the other fact of life, as expounded by Giamatti: “We all know, strikes or no strikes, there are always settlements.”

That leaves the commissioner to pull the game together, to make sure that minorities are included fairly in the hiring process, which he pledges to do. That leaves him to deal with the question of the DH in a house divided.

If he had a magic wand he would first eliminate artificial grass. Today’s economics don’t permit that. If you ask, he doesn’t like the DH either. “I think that’s the best non-life-threatening controversy in baseball,” he said.

But the intrusive electronic scoreboard and liquor in the parking lots and beer sales in the stadium are life-threatening. Marketing research shows $52 billion was spent on leisure activities last year, only 6.6 percent on spectator sports. “You fall down to four percent and you’re out of business,” he said. So he’s concerned with the scoreboard that never permits the game to carry the event. Certain kinds of video “send out signals to those people for whom video stimulation is all that is fundamentally interesting.” To him the scoreboard and its intrusion sets a tone for fan behavior: One kind of music calls for a like kind of behavior; insist that the fan drink another beer and he will.

As National League president he pressed for franchise operators to become more involved with alcohol management, with TEAM -- Techniques for Effective Alcohol Management. Dodger Stadium does it well, Busch Stadium does it better, Shea Stadium is improved, he said.

It’s another fact of life that baseball cannot be totally separated from changes in society, but people do go to the ballpark as relief from the pressures of life.

“If baseball has made the argument that it’s worth the trouble to go there instead of staying home, it has to justify itself,” Giamatti said. “Otherwise the American people have every right to choose other forms of leisure.”

If it isn’t safe and if it isn’t pleasant, then what’s the point at all. Give the new commissioner three credits toward his BB degree for making that his concern.