Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games

Bart Giamatti was an amazing man and a wonderful writer. Former president of Yale University and Commissioner of major league baseball, he had a unique and appealing vision of "Americans and their Games." I heard about this book on NPR and have shared it with many baseball-loving friends.

All men who have served as Commissioner of Baseball--a position more people probably aspire to than aspire to be President of the United States--have a dull sameness in their resumes and their manner of speech compared to the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, who died in 1989 in his rookie season as Commissioner, the only baseball commissioner to be a Renaissance Scholar and President of Yale University. Giamatti's book is a celebration of baseball's "freedom (for) the promise of an energetic, complex order." "Baseball," Giamtti writes, "fulfills the promise that America made to itself to cherish the individual while recognizing the overarching claims of the group. It sends its players out (around the bases) in order to return again, allowing all the freedom to accomplish great things in a dangerous world. So baseball restates a version of America's promises every time it is played. The playing of the game is a restatement of the promises that we can all be free, that all succeed." "Sport," Giamatti writes, "contains within itself, as a self-transforming activity, fueld by instinct and intellect alike, the motive for freedom. The very elaboration of sport--it's internal conventions of all kinds, its ceremonies, its endless meshes entangling itself--are for the purposes of training and testing (perhaps by defeating) and rewarding the rousing motion within us to find a moment (or more) of freedom. Freedom is that state where energy and order merge and complexity is purified into a simple coherence, a fitness of parts and purpose and passions that cannot be surpassed and whose goal could only be to be itself. "If we have known freedom, then we love it; it we love freedom, then we fear, at some level (individually or collectively)its loss. And then we cherish sport. As our forbears did, we remind ourselves through sport of what, here on earth, is our noblest hope. Through sport, we create our daily portion of freedom." Giamatti's eloquence and unique voice ranges widely over other subjects. "Human beings made and make cities, and only human beings kill cities, or let them die. We enjoy deluding ourselves in this as in other things. We enjoy believing that there are forces out there completely determining our fate, natural forces--or forces so strong and overwhelming as to be like natural forces--that send cities through organic or biological phases of birth, growth, and decay. We avoid the knowledge that cities are at best works of art, and at worst ungainly artifacts--but never flowers or even weeds--and that we, not some mysterious forces or cosmic biological system, control the creation and life of a city.... "A city is a collection of disparate families who agree to a fiction: they agree to live AS IF they were as close in blood or ties of kinship as in fact they are in physical proximity. Choosing life in an artifact, people agree to live in a state of similitude. A city is a place where ties of proximity, activity and self-interest

Giamatti's work here is an insightful look into the spectacle of baseball and sport in general and how they intereact with society and social values. It's a must-read for any baseball-bred sports fan.

A. Bartlett Giamatti wrote this book immediately prior to his unexpected death in 1989. It appeared in print posthumously. That he would pen a paen to baseball at the height of the Pete Rose scandal, as his last published work, is ironic. His prose is sublime. The slender volume is a monograph on the nature of the game of baseball. It is timeless because it is not tied to temporal events. With little alteration, the book could have been written a hundred years ago, or (I hope) a hundred years hence. The Commissioner of Baseball and former Yale Professor of Renaissance Literature explores the intellectual facination of the game. From the geometry of the diamond to the Homeric nature of the baserunner's struggle to reach home again, Giamatti's story is enlightening as well as entertaining. Insights into the nature of our society flow naturally, given that sport in general should be seen in the context of the civilization that spawns it. One that I found to be especially memorable was on the commonalities of learning that change from generation to generation. Giamatti wrote of how the rising generation would understand the world through a computer screen, even as their progenitors had seen it through books, and of the differences, both great and small, that it would make to the thought patterns of our young. All this against the literally timneless fabric of a game played without a clock. -Lloyd A. Conway