Sport: In a Green Field, in the Sun

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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.