By far the most literate of baseball's commissioners, the late Bart Giamatti, former president of Yale, was the game's most unashamedly vocal fan both before and during his tenure as chief executive. The child of immigrants, he embraced baseball's very Americanness, and ascribed to its simple goal--coming home--a far-reaching, overall metaphor. His ardor was unguarded and unabashed, his approach sentimental and as expansive as a pair of foul lines diverging in the distance. Giamatti's oversized passion infuses everything in this slim volume, from his wistful elegy to Tom Seaver and his admonition to fans to clean up their act, to his pained public statement banning Pete Rose from the game for life. Best of all, his seductively lyrical essay "The Green Fields of the Mind" leads off the lineup. The latter alone--it begins by poignantly observing of baseball, "It breaks your heart. It's designed to break your heart"--is worth the price of admission.


From Publishers Weekly
In the baseball pantheon, Giamatti occupies an unusual place: leaving the presidency of Yale University, he became the president of the National League and then, for the five months before his death in 1989, the commissioner of baseball. Although his writings on the subject were few, all radiated a love for the game as well as an appreciation of it as a metaphor for American life and, indeed, life in general. He saw baseball as quintessentially American because it combined individual achievement with successful teamwork and because, in a country where rootlessness appears to be a pervasive national characteristic, there is always the quest to go home. Yale clinical professor Robson has collected nine Giamatti writings, including the often-anthologized essay "The Green Fields of the Mind" and the statement banning Pete Rose from baseball for life, in which he notes that "no individual is superior to the game." The collection will appeal primarily to the most diehard baseball fans. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Peggy Constantine
Giamatti loved baseball and he loved language, and those passions are marvelously merged throughout the pages of this memorable book.


The Wall Street Journal, Richard J. Tofel
It is a treasure.


Los Angeles Times
Giamatti's death ... cut far too short the life of a scholar, a baseball fan, and in the most old-fashioned sense, a custodian of what baseball means to a lot of Americans.


From Kirkus Reviews
Giamatti died just nine years ago, after having served as commissioner of baseball for only five months. Already, however, a Greek word that appears several times in this slim collection applies to the memories of Giamatti held by many fans: nostos, the yearning for home. They yearn for the faraway days of 1989, when baseball still clung to vestiges of old glories and verities, and a man like Giamatti, a literature scholar and former president of Yale University, could write seriously about the sport as the ultimate metaphor for all of America. Giamatti would share fans' grief at the continuing debasement of the sport (consider the 1997 rent-a-champs Florida Marlins), but not their pessimism. The people who run baseball today, however hapless or greedy, dare not tamper with the rules of the game, whose symmetries are a constant source of fascination for Giamatti. Nor can they change the tension at the heart of the game between freedom and order that embodies, as Giamatti puts it, ``the promise America made itself to cherish the individual while recognizing the overarching claims of the group.'' The collector of these writings, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut, apparently dug up virtually every word Giamatti wrote on the sport, not all of which needed to be set in marble. But even the most jaded and long-cooled passions will be stirred by Giamatti's erudite and intense love of baseball. Baseball, to him, is so like America in its interplay between individual freedom and the rule of law that it will be forever the national pastime, regardless of how far it slips from national favor. (The volume has a foreword by David Halberstam.) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
With a foreword by David Halberstam. He spoke out against player trading. He banned Pete Rose from baseball for gambling. He even asked sports fans to clean up their acts. Bart Giamatti was baseball's Renaissance man and its commissioner. In A GREAT AND GLORIOUS GAME, a collection of spirited, incisive essays, Giamatti reflects on the meaning of the game. Baseball, for him, was a metaphor for life. He artfully argues that baseball is much more than an American "pastime." "Baseball is about going home," he wrote, "and how hard it is to get there and how driven is our need." And in his powerful 1989 decision to ban Pete Rose from baseball, Giamatti states that no individual is superior to the game itself, just as no individual is superior to our democracy. A GREAT AND GLORIOUS GAME is a thoughtful meditation on baseball, character, and values by one of the most eloquent men in the world of sport.


Back cover,
Giamatti was to the Commissioner's office what Sandy Koufax was to the pitcher's mound: Giamatti's career had the highest ratio of excellence to longevity.