If Don Baylor were a horse, they would have shot him, as in the title of the 1969 Jane Fonda film, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”

Baylor might have been considered a horse in his playing days, but he apparently has turned into a broken-down old coach. How else explain that on his team’s opening night he broke a leg catching Vladimir Guerrero’s ceremonial first pitch?

Before the curtain goes up on Broadway shows, it is customary for the actors to tell one another, “Break a leg,” but they don’t mean it literally. It’s a figurative way of saying “Have a good show.”

But Baylor, their hitting coach, really broke a leg, and the Anaheim Angels didn’t even have a good game. They had a bad game, losing to the Seattle Mariners, 10-3.

In his 17-year playing career, Baylor was as tough as …

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Editor’s note: The 2014 baseball season is upon us, and as baseball romantics tell us, this is an ideal time for fathers and sons (why don’t they ever say anything about fathers and daughters?). In this guest column, the writer tells about his father, too briefly a prominent baseball figure, who died at far too young an age.

This is the 25th Opening Day since my father, the former Major League Baseball Commissioner and President of Yale University, Bart Giamatti, passed away suddenly one crisp, September afternoon at the age of 51.

The world has changed quite a bit since then. There are those who remember him, those who have forgotten him and those who never had the pleasure to know him. So it seems appropriate on this anniversary to remind us all – and to introduce those newcomers – to who Bart Giamatti was. And what he stood for.

My father was a man of great humor. Not a day passed for him without …

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It quickly became a different morning.

I turned on the television to get the weather and found a baseball game, the season opener in Australia, in fact, between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Arizona Diamondbacks. I turned it on just in time to see Oliver Perez hit a batter. Nothing different about that.

If Perez isn’t hitting a batter, a batter is hitting him. Oliver might be the player who fooled me more than any other. He had a great season for a bad team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, 10 years ago, and I thought he had a great future.

Perez fooled Omar Minaya, too. Minaya was the New York Mets’ general manager, and he had to decide whether to let Perez leave as a free agent or pay him more than he should. As I said, Perez fooled Minaya, too, but it cost the Mets $36 million and Minaya his job.

So there I was watching Perez hit a batter and Manager Kirk Gibson taking him out of the opener when Ellen, my wife, yelled urgently for me to come quickly. That usually doesn’t happen in our house at 7 o’clock in the morning. But I responded in time to look out the front window and see …

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