Downfall: Baseball’s Public Trust and the Battle for the Game | Episode 2

Giamatti's principled view of Baseball’s public duty to the fans and to America; a fuller exploration of Baseball’s embrace of the “Mark Zuckerberg Mentality” that ensures a place for the “snakes in the garden,” including through the guidance revealed by movies, “Moneyball,” “The Social Network,” and “The Natural;” and the duty of those who remain - the Hall of Fame, the Little League, the Sportswriters, and the Umpires - to do Epic Battle to preserve the authenticity of the game. 

Relying on Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti’s actual words and those read by his actor son, Marcus, “Downfall” examines Giamatti’s moral, ethical, and historical decision to ban Pete Rose from baseball in 1989. And it reveals, through Giamatti’s other actions and temperament developed in battles earlier in his life, including at Yale, that his decision was but the prelude to a grander strategy to win the Epic Battle against greed and cheating by Baseball’s “snakes in the garden,” which Baseball, steeped in its “Zuckerberg Mentality,” has since been unwilling and, without the intervention of other forces,  is incapable of waging. Emmy award winning journalist, Diane Smith, and Giamatti biographer, Neil Thomas Proto, lead the way.