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The father of actor Paul Giamatti? He was Commissioner of Major League Baseball

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11 Jan 2022
5 min read
Question: this actor's father was commissioner of major league baseball for five months in 1989 before dying in office of a heart attack...

Actor Paul Giamatti is known to movie audiences and TV viewers alike as many things, ranging from: Pig Vomit in Private Parts; Bob Zmuda in Man on the Moon; Harvey Pekar in American Splendor; the title character in HBO’s John Adams; Miles Raymond in Sideways; and Chuck Rhoades in the Showtime series, Billions.

What the prolific Giamatti is not often known as is the son of A. Bartlett Giamatti, the seventh Commissioner of Major League Baseball, whose tenure lasted a mere five months before he died of a heart attack at just 51-years-old.  His tenure is the shortest in the history of the game, and he is the lone Commissioner in MLB history to not serve over the course of a full baseball season.

Prior to being elected to success Peter Ueberroth as MLB’s Commish, the elder Giamatti, known as an ardent fan of the Boston Red Sox, was President of baseball’s National League from 1986-89; before that, at a mere 40-years-old, he was named President of Yale University in 1978, becoming the youngest-ever person elected as such.

And while Giamatti’s sad, premature passing is mourned into baseball’s modern day, his brief reign wasn’t without its lasting influence; as Commissioner, Giamatti negotiated the lifetime baseball ban of all-time hits leader Pete Rose (4,256 hits) for betting on games.  Following the agreement with Rose, Giamatti would pass a mere eight days later.

As for his famed, actor son, rare is the moment when Paul Giamatti talks about either baseball or his father in interviews; to wit, in a 2016 chat with The New York Times, discussing his role as a sports psychologist in baseball movie, “The Phenom,” Giamatti, said (succinctly), when asked about his father, and being a baseball fan:

“No, my brother, Marcus, is a bigger baseball fan than I am. My dad did a lot of different things. He also loved movies, so I’d go see them with him.”

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