A. Bartlett Giamatti Quotes

A. Bartlett Giamatti Quotes

A. Bartlett Giamatti was elected to a term of five years as the seventh commissioner of baseball as of the eighth day on September 8th, 1988, by an unanimous vote of the 26 owners of the club.

Born to Boston, MA on April 4 1938, Giamatti enrolled at Yale University where he received the Master of Arts degree magna cum laude in English in the year 1960. Giamatti later earned his Ph.D. from Yale in Comparative Literature in 1964.

Following his doctorate Giamatti began teaching Italian as well as Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Giamatti came back to Yale in the year 1966, when he was appointed the assistant professor in English. He was promoted to full professor in the year 1971 at the age of 33 . He was head of Yale's Division of Humanities from 1975 until the year 78.

He was elected the president of Yale in Julyof 1978 and served for over ten years. Following his departure, he was a part of Major League Baseball and was named the 12th president of the National League on December 11 of 1986.

In his two years during his time as NL Presidency, Giamatti earned a reputation for his commitment to preserving baseball's tradition as well as its values and integrity. Giamatti's presidency focused on the necessity of improving the conditions for fans at the ballparks.

 "A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "Baseball has the largest library of law and love and custom and ritual, and therefore, in a nation that fundamentally believes it is a nation under law, well, baseball is America's most privileged version of the level field." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "No one man is superior to the game." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "There are a lot of people who know me who can't understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they're here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "I'm not going to sit here now and say 'do this,' or 'do that.' But you must - must - expunge any vestige of racism." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "The university is our culture's assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "It is not enough to offer a smorgasbord of courses. We must insure that students are not just eating at one end of the table." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "To go from Yale to the National League is simply to go from one form of management to another." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "A tremendous social responsibility comes with being a successful public performer." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "Major sports are major parts of society. It's not anomalous to have people who love sports come from other parts of that society." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "We have an obligation to spread amateur baseball both at home and abroad. Building up the game at all levels - Little League, Babe Ruth Leagues, the colleges - is in our own self-interest. That's where the pool of talent is - and also of fans." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "All I ever wanted to be president of was the American League." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "The professionals must set a good example." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "This is not the first time in my life where you know going into a job that you're going to hear in stereo what was wrong with what you did." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "Americans have been remarkably devoted to the capacity for belief, to idealism. That's why we get into trouble all the time. We're always viewed as naive." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "The people of America care about baseball, not about your squalid little squabbles. Reassume your dignity and remember that you (players during the 1981 strike) are the temporary custodians of an enduring public trust." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "I'm the world's expert on sterotypes held by academics about athletes and held by athletes about academics. To me, both of them are caricatures." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "As I grew up, I knew that as a building it was on the level of Mount Olympus, the Pyramid of Giza, the nation's capital, the czar's winter palace, and the Louvre - except, of course, that it was better than all of those inconsequential places." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "There's nothing bad that accrues from baseball." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "I think that the young people today feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to their brothers and sisters because of the sacrifices that most families make to send their children to college." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination? through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "People will say I'm an idealist. I hope so." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "Baseball has undergone and absorbed a whole set of dislocations." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "Some of my academic friends think Ive fallen from a very special grace." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

 "On a good day, I view the job [of president] as directing an orchestra. On the dark days, it is more like that of a clutch -- engaging the engine to effect forward motion, while taking greater friction." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti