On the day that Pete Rose was banned from baseball in August 1989, Major League Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti did something that is impossible to imagine today.He stood in front of a horde of reporters at the New York Hilton in midtown Manhattan. He looked into a bank of television cameras beaming his news conference live into living rooms nationwide. He gave a short and poetic statement, announcing Rose’s permanent banishment from the game and the reasons for it, and then Giamatti took the reporters’ questions for about 45 minutes — on live television.