Without a professor since Casey Stengel, baseball last week persuaded the president of Yale University, A. Bartlett (“Hit them where they aren’t”) Giamatti, to jump to the National League. As the commissioner of baseball is a reformed travel agent, and the president of the American League is a retired cardiologist, the choice of an English teacher to replace Chub Feeney made a surprising kind of sense, though Chub has never hurried away from a press conference to deliver a lecture on Machiavelli.

A few days earlier, signaling that something literary might be up, Commissioner Peter Ueberroth whimsically interrupted the amateur free-agent draft to award the New York Yankees a “special pick,” G. Frederick Will of University High School in Champaign, Ill. Shopped as a fledgling shortstop, Will in truth is a fully developed columnist, usually called George, who cannot go to his left. He is 45, Giamatti 48, but they seemed as connected by chance as Tinker and Evers, for the dreamy realizations of Will brought home the realized dreams of Giamatti, who seemed to begin exploring this uncommon transfer in his 1977 essay “The Green Fields of the Mind.”

Realizing “there comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it,” he resolved not to grow out of sports. “There are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown up or up to date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.”

A bulging man with flashing eyes and a gray goatee, Giamatti has probably muttered “Damn Yankees” once or twice before but favors neither young Joe Hardy nor old Joe Boyd as much as Mr. Applegate. He claims no athletic laurels. “I was the kid in high school who carried water and kept score.” But his particular affection for “the fundamental grid, the geometric beauty of baseball” has always been profound. “My first glove was one left behind by an American soldier in Italy.” Giamatti’s father Valentine was there on sabbatical from the languages department at Mount Holyoke College. Though Italian enough to feel possessive of DiMaggio (“Yes, both of them; all three of them, as a matter of fact”), “Bart” was born in Boston. “I wanted to be (Second Baseman) Bobby Doerr, to tell you the truth.” By wretched geography, he has been shackled for life to the Bosox, whose cap Giamatti has only this week put aside.

To laugh off his prospects of becoming the youngest Yale president in more than 200 years–actually to avoid a premature announcement in 1977–Giamatti had quipped that “the only thing I want to be president of is the American League.” Since 1918, when Pitcher Babe Ruth converted to the outfield, the / Red Sox have qualified for three World Series and lost them all in the seventh game. So it is consistent with the braced and blighted life of a Boston fan that even when an ultimate wish is granted, fate connects with the wrong circuit. Still, the National is the older league, a serious virtue to a scholar who has given half a life to mythology and antiquity, and who subscribes to the Hoboken Theory of Baseball’s Origin at least in part because of presumed Founder Alexander Cartwright’s wonderful, ancient-sounding Elysian Fields.

What’s more, the Nationals still play nine-man baseball. “I have very strong and subtle convictions about the DH (designated hitter),” says Giamatti, “which I’ll try to soften for you–it’s appalling.” How does he view artificial turf, then? “I think everyone would agree that grass is wonderful.” And television? In Feeney’s 16 years on the job, he probably performed countless noble services besides signing the baseballs and assigning the umpires, but his lasting image may be the memory of a 1977 night in Philadelphia when he presided over a play-off game persistently televised in a squall. “The real activity,” wrote Giamatti of a summer past, “was done with the radio–not the all-seeing, all-falsifying television–and was the playing of the game in the only place it will last, the enclosed, green field of the mind.”

Now he may change his mind, but it seems unlikely. Giamatti’s application for his maybe six-figure post (ballpark estimate) included an open letter published during the 1981 strike: “The people of America care about baseball, not about your squalid little squabbles. Reassume your dignity and remember that you are the temporary custodians of an enduring public trust . . . You are evidently so enthralled by your mucky pelf and your self-serving stratagems that you have forgotten what your trusteeship means. I will tell you.” Still not completely sure what pelf is, the owners have put him in charge of it.

“I will have an enormous range of duties,” he says, when the transition occurs in December. The bare responsibilities, approving players’ contracts, presiding at owners’ meetings, sound flat and unworthy. But the clubs may be in for an education. “Especially intriguing is the relationship between cities and franchises, whose mutual health is profoundly interrelated. I’ll miss the academy, but this has been a positive search for a new challenge, a way to keep learning. It’s a wonderful arena.” Around baseball, language should start to bear more analysis. Seldom has any game employed a leader capable of appreciating the irony in Tom Seaver’s California hometown of Fresno–“the name means ash tree”–or of referring to a record string of strikeouts as “an auto-da-fe that has never been bettered.” Not only that, he can define a gerund. “I’m not here to teach literature,” Giamatti says, or to meddle with the game. “One tampers with baseball as little as possible, and very, very, gingerly.” It’s still three strikes and you’re out, three outs and you’re up, take two and hit to right, and as Leo Durocher used to say, autos-da-fe are made to be bettered.

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