Baseball Commissioner Giamatti, Key Figure in Rose Scandal, Dies

Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, embroiled all season in the Pete Rose gambling scandal, died Friday of a heart attack suffered at his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard, police said. He was 51.

Police said doctors pronounced the scholar and former Yale president dead at 4:40 p.m. EDT at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital.

Deputy Police Chief Stephen McKinnon said officers found Giamatti “unconscious and in full cardiac arrest” after Edgartown police responded to a report of a heart attack at about 3 p.m.

The spokesman said they administered emergency treatment at the scene and en route to the hospital.

Deputy to Take Over

Giamatti became the first commissioner to die in office since Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1944. Under baseball rules, the commissioner’s job is to be immediately filled by the deputy commissioner and chief operating officer, Francis Vincent Jr.

Giamatti became baseball commissioner in April. Before that he served as president of the National League for two years.

For the last five months he had been preoccupied with the scandal over the alleged gambling of Rose, baseball’s all-time hit leader and the former manager of the Cincinnati Reds.

The two sides announced a settlement Aug. 24 that resulted in Rose being banned from baseball for life with the possibility of reinstatement after a year.

Case Called ‘Prejudged’

Throughout the legal tangle of events, Rose repeatedly said Giamatti was unfit to preside over a hearing into his activities. Rose had said the commissioner had “prejudged” the case and the issue was better suited for the courts.

Giamatti was elected commissioner last Sept. 8 and officially succeeded Peter Ueberroth April 1.

Giamatti’s most publicized decision as NL president also dealt with Rose. Giamatti suspended the Reds manager for 30 days early in the 1988 season for bumping umpire Dave Pallone.

Giamatti was one of Yale’s most popular professors of English and comparative literature before becoming the university’s 19th president in 1977. He put Yale’s financial house in order within the next four years, finding ways of saving money without jeopardizing excellence at America’s third-oldest educational institution.

Sense of Humor

A man whose sense of humor rarely failed him, Giamatti had said the thing that worried him most in his first days as president was that “I had no fundamental idea of what I was supposed to be doing.”

As Yale’s president, he composed a noteworthy speech in 1981 condemning the Moral Majority. The five-page, single-spaced address was delivered in writing to the 1,267 members of the Yale Class of 1985 because he was recuperating from kidney stone surgery.

Angelo Bartlett Giamatti was born April 4, 1938, in Boston. His father, Valentine Giamatti, graduated from Yale in 1932, taught Italian at Mount Holyoke College and was professor emeritus. The elder Giamatti said he never dreamed he would have a son chosen president of Yale.

His mother, Mary Claybaugh Walton Giamatti, was a 1935 graduate of Smith College.

Majored in English

He attended South Hadley High School, the International School of Rome while his father was in Italy on a sabbatical leave, and Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. He majored in English at Yale and graduated magna cum laude in 1960, the same year he married Toni Smith of Plainfield, N.J.

He received his doctorate in comparative literature from Yale in 1964. He joined the Yale faculty in 1966 after stints at Princeton and New York University, where he taught Italian and comparative literature.

His major interests as a scholar was the Renaissance with emphasis on the literature of Italy and England--including 16th-Century English poet Edmund Spenser; Renaissance epic poetry; and medieval literature, particularly Provencal poetry and Dante.

Giamatti’s first book, “The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epoch,” was published in 1966 and was followed in 1975 by “Play of Double Senses: Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” an introductory guide to the great English poem for undergraduates.

Founded Ballet Company

Giamatti was not an athlete in his youth, but developed a lifelong passion for sports. He was a rabid Boston Red Sox fan and a familiar figure in a Red Sox baseball cap when he arrived in his teaching and writing days at a ballet company to pick up his daughter, Elena, after practice.

He was a founder of the ballet company and once was cast along with Elena and one of his two sons in “The Nutcracker Suite,” playing a dashing version of Herr Drosselmeir, the toy maker, in a non-dancing role.

An article he wrote entitled “Tom Seaver’s Farewell,” which had originally appeared in Harper’s magazine, was selected as the Best Magazine Story by E.P. Dutton for its book “Best Sports Stories in 1978.” His story on boxer Muhammad Ali, called “Hyperbole’s Child,” also appeared in Harper’s.

Giamatti is survived by his wife Toni, daughter Elena, and sons, Marcus and Paul.