A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti »

Kenneth S. Robson, M.D., is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut, a clinical professor at Yale University, his alma mater, and a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist.

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.

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 the game 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 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."