Yale President Named to Head NL : A. Bartlett Giamatti, Avid Red Sox Fan, to Succeed Feeney

NEW YORK —  A. Bartlett Giamatti, retiring Yale president and Renaissance scholar, was named president of the National League here Tuesday.

Asked if Dante, the Italian classic writer, would approve his appointment, the 48-year-old educator replied that, yes, Dante knew about paradise.

Giamatti, 48, an avid Boston Red Sox fan, will trade the Ivy League for the National League when he takes over from president Charles (Chub) Feeney at the winter baseball meetings on Dec. 11. Until then, he said, he will be “Mr. Feeney’s apprentice.”

Said Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth: “He’s bright, he loves the game. With two doctors, maybe the patient (baseball) will get well.” Giamatti is a Ph.D., and Bobby Brown, president of the American League, is a heart specialist.

Giamatti will become the 12th president in the league’s 110-year history. Until now, his career has been solely in the academic field. A graduate of Yale, he taught at Princeton and then Yale. He wrote numerous articles and essays and has published five books. “I even tried to write about baseball,” he said with a laugh.

When he was appointed Yale president in July, 1978, Giamatti immediately faced a $2-million budget deficit. Within four years he had balanced the university’s budget by eliminating faculty positions through a hiring freeze rather than layoffs. He also spearheaded an alumni contribution drive that increased donations from $9.5 million in 1978 to $26.3 million in 1985.

More than 2,600 technical and clerical workers walked out for 10 weeks in a 1984 strike at Yale. Asked Tuesday if that experience would be helpful in his new job, Giamatti said only, “It adds to my experience.”

The National League president-designate acknowledged that he has no experience in professional sports but said that he “has had a lot of connections with organized sports, overseeing the 35 sports teams at Yale.”

As a boy, Giamatti said, he played the normal amount of baseball, and in 1951 he once managed a team. How did his team play? Said Giamatti, straight-faced, “They did as well as they could.”

Though he had been mentioned frequently previously as a candidate for commissioner of baseball, Giamatti said it had not been a serious possibility. “There were people who wanted to talk to me about it, but in public, and in my own mind, I was not a candidate.”

The National League presidency came to him, Giamatti said, explaining: “I got a call from Peter O’Malley (president of the Dodgers and a member of the search committee) who wondered if we could chat. I said yes.”

Giamatti emphasized that he would bring “a willingness to learn” to his new job. He will make few changes in the game, he said, because “one tampers with baseball as little as humanly possible.