We’ve all heard the stories. The Last Manager, by John W. Miller, digs into why Earl was like that.
The legend of the Earl of Baltimore is one that will always stand large in the annals of Baltimore professional sports. If you are old enough that you lived through it, you might have witnessed some of the antics yourself, or at least read about them in the next day’s newspaper. If you didn’t, then maybe you heard about it from your dad, like I did. Earl was a one-of-a-kind character, a trailblazing genius, a tormentor of umpires. A question often not asked as these legends are told: Why was Earl like that?
In a biography of Weaver published last month, journalist John W. Miller seeks to answer that very question. The publisher, Simon & Schuster, provided me a copy of The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball in order to facilitate this review. It’s spent multiple weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list.
This is a history of baseball that has been written for Orioles fans, non-Orioles fans, and non-baseball fans alike. Miller starts at the end of Weaver’s managerial career – the first end, that is – setting the scene of the final game of the 1982 Orioles season, in which the team lost its chance to win the American League East with a 10-2 loss to the Brewers. What was it about Weaver that led to that post-game curtain call?
To answer this, Miller winds back the clock decades further to a fateful spring training that ultimately set Weaver on the road to becoming a manager. This was 1952, before even my dad’s time, and Weaver was a notable prospect in the Cardinals system who was on the cusp of making it to the majors. He played alongside future Hall of Famers and looked like he belonged.
There was one problem: The Cardinals had just brought in Eddie Stanky to serve as player/manager, and he was the biggest roster competition for the then-21-year-old Weaver. Miller’s biography uses the choice of past-his-prime Stanky favoring himself as a bookend, with Earl being dumped back into the minors, where his disappointment cratered his playing career as he turned more into alcohol and his attitude soured.
From there, Miller returns to the beginning: Weaver growing up in St. Louis, both the farthest west and the farthest south outpost of MLB in the United States in these old days. There were two teams to service this baseball city: The Cardinals and the Browns, who later became the Orioles. Between a shady bookmaker uncle and a businessman dad who could get a sponsorship and coach a youth team, the young Earl had all he needed from the world around him to grow a love for baseball. He was good at it, too.
In this journey through the early years of Earl Weaver’s baseball story, Miller takes his reader back to a baseball and an America that is before even my dad’s time. It’s a time of 43 different minor leagues, where the local minor league affiliate really is the biggest thing going for so many people and the manager being a character is the talk of the town and a draw in the stands. They still love Earl in Rochester.
It’s a time of train trips, of minor league camps in World War II-era military barracks, of newspapers all over this land dedicating pages on pages to baseball of all kinds. Miller sifts through a lot of old interviews and newspaper accounts to conjure both a general sense of what this life was like and a specific sense of what it was like for Weaver.
Orioles fans might find fewer surprises than others through these pages, since so many of the greatest hits that you might expect to be mentioned are featured. Ejected from both games of a doubleheader? Yes. The long-running tension with Jim Palmer? Of course. Ripping up the rulebook in front of an umpire? It’s in there. The infamous joke recording of “Manager’s Corner” where Earl talked about team speed, Terry Crowley, and Alice Sweet from Norfolk? Oh yeah.
I think any Orioles fan will be informed and entertained by the big picture of Weaver’s career. Through the stories of the antics, the cutting-edge (if rudimentary by today’s standards) understanding of the importance of statistics, Weaver’s early adoption of the radar gun for measuring pitchers, and more, it’s not hard to see why Weaver’s name still echoes loudly today.
It’s not just a recital of the good times. The book is structured with a chapter on most seasons in Weaver’s managerial career. Early on, there are plenty of good times, particularly the three straight AL titles from 1969-1971, with the World Series championship in the middle.
It’s easy, looking back now, especially for those of us who didn’t live through it, to imagine Weaver must have been a fixture for as long as he wanted to be a fixture. He was on one-year contracts for a decade! It is hard to fathom all of the slightly different ways that Weaver’s legendary career could have been cut short by short-sighted and cheap people.
Miller’s account makes sure that everyone can take away that there were tenuous times for Weaver through the 1970s, facing shifting sands of Orioles ownership and the front office, and a changing baseball labor landscape that brought on the dawning of free agency.
The year-by-year journey gives the context for Weaver’s reinvention in time for the birth of Orioles Magic. It wasn’t guaranteed, but he did it anyway, all the way down to his (first) last season, when he smoothly handled Cal Ripken Jr. breaking into the majors and shifting to shortstop, a decision that, as every Orioles fan knows, ultimately revolutionized the position by proving that taller guys who hit better could play there too.
You might think you’ve already heard all there is to know in the legend of Earl Weaver, but trust me: You’d better read this biography just to make sure.