Giamatti to Succeed Ueberroth

National League President A. Bartlett Giamatti was elected by the 26 major league owners Thursday to succeed Peter Ueberroth and become the seventh commissioner of baseball.

Giamatti, former president of Yale University and a scholar in Renaissance literature, needed support from three-fourths of the owners but was elected unanimously to a 5-year term that will begin April 1.

The vote was taken at a quarterly owners’ meeting in Montreal and was the first of a series of high-level changes anticipated since Ueberroth announced on June 7 he would not seek a second term.

The ascension of Giamatti, 50, a longtime Boston Red Sox fan who brings a grass-roots flavor to the commissioner’s office, is also expected to trigger:

--The election of Frank Cashen, president of the New York Mets, as National League president when the World Series is over, and the appointment of Joe McIlvaine, the Mets’ vice president of baseball operations, as club president.

--The selection of a business- oriented chief executive officer to work with Giamatti, who is expected to take on the role of communicator and disciplinarian but may be less an authoritarian activist than Ueberroth was.

--The possible removal of Barry Rona as executive director of the owners’ Player Relations Committee.

Rona’s role in the two collusion cases has displeased many of the owners, according to sources. In those cases, the owners were found guilty of violating the collective bargaining agreement and could be fined millions of dollars.

The owners, who had the choice of following their leadership or choosing another route, are said to be equally displeased with Ueberroth’s direction on the collusion issue and have been seeking to hasten the appointment of a successor, hoping Ueberroth will leave office before his contract expires at the end of 1989.

Ueberroth said Thursday that he will work with Giamatti on a transitional basis until April 1, after which he will leave the office to his successor and be available for consultation if needed. Ueberroth said he will retain his power to operate in “the best interest of baseball” until April 1.

Giamatti and his staff will then be left to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement, since the current contract expires at the end of next season, as does the national television contract. Ueberroth, however, said negotiations have already begun on a new TV deal and predicted it will be completed by the end of March.

“I don’t feel that I’ll be leaving (office) early,” he said, although April is eight months ahead of his original schedule. “I feel I’ll be leaving in the right way. If you look at the history of transitions, they generally haven’t gone well, but I think this one will. Bart is the perfect choice for this time. His passion for the game will keep it on a steady course through the 1990s and into the next century. I have no plans of my own.”

In announcing he will not accept a second term as commissioner, Ueberroth said that the position should be restricted to one term, that if done in the right way too many people would have been alienated for the commissioner to attempt to govern a second time.

Giamatti said Thursday that as president of Yale, a position he held for eight years, there came a time when he began repeating his word and defending himself, but that he does not take on this new assignment with any preconceived notion as to how long he should stay.

“I have a 5-year contract and that’s all I’m thinking about, not more or less,” he said.

Giamatti was elected National League president June 9, 1986. He has long been considered the leading candidate to succeed Ueberroth and was supported by owners Bud Selig of the Milwaukee Brewers and Fred Wilponof the Mets, who were in charge of the selection process.

“We went through a 2 1/2-year search the last time,” Selig said of the process that turned up Ueberroth. “With that and the state of the game in mind, we felt we had a logical candidate in Bart. There were other names on our list, but we interviewed none of them.”

Asked about rumors that there was opposition to Giamatti in the American League, Selig said, “It was only in the Lamont Cranston mold--shadowy at best.”

A man of letters, Giamatti is also comfortable with numbers, and his negotiating skills were said to be another factor in his favor. In four years of cost-cutting at Yale, he wiped out a $2-million deficit.

Asked about the relationship between management and players, Giamatti said there is far too much strain. He said it has to get better but that he won’t be directly involved in labor negotiations, nor is it a subject he will talk much about in the future, that it’s best handled in the privacy of a closed room.

He added, however, that he hopes to create an informal atmosphere in which he will feel free to pick up the phone and discuss problems with Donald Fehr, executive director of the Players Assn.

“I’m not saying I will ever call Mr. Fehr, but I would like to think that I could,” Giamatti said. “I don’t believe in escalating rhetoric. People get wounded inadvertently.”

Giamatti acknowledged that there are areas and subjects he has to bone up on, and that he will definitely be looking for a person of “size and substance” in the business area.

“I don’t bring the same type (business) acumen to this job that my colleague (Ueberroth) did,” Giamatti said. He also said his priorities are similar to those of Ueberroth.

He listed minority hiring, crowd and substance control, and the preservation of the game’s integrity. He cited baseball’s place in the national culture and said affirmative action represented social justice. Of expansion, Giamatti said the TV and labor issues have to be settled first and that he sees no change in the “timetable of the ‘90s.”

In his capacity as National League president, Giamatti has become known as the dean of discipline, having suspended Kevin Gross of the Philadelphia Phillies for doctoring baseballs, Billy Hatcher of the Houston Astros for corking a bat and Manager Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds 30 days for his run-in with umpire Dave Pallone.

“Order without freedom is repression and freedom without order is anarchy,” he once said, exhibiting a literacy that may require translation in most dugouts. On Thursday, Giamatti described baseball as a business, an institution, a cultural artifact.

Asked, as a lifelong fan, how he felt becoming commissioner, he paused, then said: “As National League president, I could go to the World Series, at least, with a rooting interest. Now I’ll have to find a way to become nonpartisan by April 1.”

THE COMMISSIONERS Commissioner: Kenesaw Mountain Landis Service: Jan. 12, 1921 to Nov. 25, 1944 Commissioner: Albert B. (Happy) Chandler Service: April 24, 1945 to July 15, 1951 Commissioner: Ford C. Frick Service: Oct. 8, 1951 to Dec. 14, 1965 Commissioner: William D. (Spike) Eckert Service: Dec. 15, 1965 to Feb. 4, 1969 Commissioner: Bowie K. Kuhn Service: Feb. 4, 1969 to Sept. 30, 1984 Commissioner: Peter V. Ueberroth Service: Oct. 1, 1984 to March 30, 1989 Commissioner: A. Bartlett Giamatti Service: April 1, 1989