“The Last Manager,” John Miller’s new biography of baseball Hall of Famer Earl Weaver, has two key pitches in its arsenal.
One is a fastball down the pipe: Weaver, as long-time fans recall, was a cantankerous throwback who theatrically harried umpires and routinely got tossed from games, all on the way to four World Series appearances (including two against the Pittsburgh Pirates) and one Series win with the Baltimore Orioles.
The other pitch is a sneaky change-up: Weaver was a visionary, whose prescient use of technology and statistics starting in the late 1960s prefigured now-ubiquitous baseball strategies so effectively that it helped make managers like him obsolete.
Weaver, who died in 2013, was both a walking cartoon and all too human — a bundle of question marks and exclamation points irresistible to Pittsburgh-based former Wall Street Journal reporter Miller.
“Why the Orioles were so good”
Miller is a life-long O’s fan less by geography than by blood ties. He grew up in the 1980s in Brussels where, as the French-speaking son of American musicians, he picked up baseball amid the sizable community of expatriate kids. And with his mother hailing from Baltimore and his father from suburban Washington, D.C., he was indoctrinated into Orioles culture by family, and by games broadcast on Armed Forces Radio, at a time when the team was mediocre at best.
“I read Earl Weaver's memoir when I was 10 years old and was always entranced by that story,” Miller said. “It was almost like reading about Julius Caesar in fourth-century Rome, wondering what had happened to this collapsed empire, and why the Orioles were so good during that time and why they stunk when I was a kid.”
In each of Weaver’s first three full seasons as manager, the Orioles went to the World Series, losing to the Mets in ’69 before beating the Reds and then falling to the Roberto Clemente-led Bucs. (They also dropped the ’79 Series to the Willie Stargell-led “We Are Family” Pirates.) And throughout Weaver’s tenure, they almost invariably finished first or second in the highly competitive American League East.
True, Weaver usually had exceptional players, from hitters like Brooks Robinson, Eddie Murray and Ken Singleton to pitchers like Jim Palmer and Mike Flanagan. But no managers of his era won as often or as consistently. How’d he do it?
Looking for an edge
Weaver, born in 1930, grew up in St. Louis, a scrappy working-class kid who idolized the Cardinals, including the wild and woolly Gas House Gang of players like Dizzy Dean and Leo Durocher.
As a player in the Orioles system, second-baseman Weaver was a career minor-leaguer. But Miller finds the roots of his managerial brilliance in his immersion, from childhood, in gambling. Raised largely by his Uncle Bud, a bookie, Weaver was forever calculating odds and looking for an edge. Exposed in his playing days to folks like Orioles general manager Paul Richards, the baseball stats pioneer who invented on-base percentage, Weaver was primed to look beyond standard measures of a player’s worth, like batting average and runs batted in.
“When he got to the major leagues in 1968, he asked the Orioles PR man, Bill Brown, to compile lists of pitcher-batter matchups for the entire American League,” Miller said. “And he realized that by matching up individual pitchers and batters, he could have an advantage, an edge in managing these games.”
“It's very rudimentary by modern standards, but it points towards the future of Bill James and Sabermetrics and the sort of computerized baseball management systems we have today,” adds Miller, a long-time youth baseball coach currently preparing to begin his first full season managing Allderdice High School’s varsity baseball squad.
And indeed, Weaver’s teams, hoarding every out, bunted and stole much less, and used pinch-hitters more, than the average for teams of his era. In some ways, his sharp-eyed approach prefigured the practices of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane described in Michael Lewis’ book “Moneyball.”
As documented in “The Last Manager” (Avid Reader Press), Weaver was also an early adopter of the radar gun to measure pitch speed — helpful, for instance, in knowing when a pitcher was tiring.
“Baseball managers were stars”
But Weaver was hardly just a numbers-cruncher. He was — along with Yankees firecracker Billy Martin — one of the more colorful managers of his era, known for his over-the-top fights with umpires, one of which included ripping up a rule book on the field and scattering its pages to the breeze.
“The Last Manager,” out this week, is already garnering strong reviews. The book’s title, meanwhile, is Miller’s rhetorical way of noting broader changes in baseball and American life on the whole.
“This is a story about a time when baseball managers were stars, not only within baseball, but within the culture itself,” he says. As Miller writes, while any manager might get ink in, say, Sports Illustrated, Weaver was famous enough to be interviewed in a cultural arbiter like Playboy the same year as Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez and cable-TV tycoon Ted Turner.
Moreover, those were the last days when baseball clubs prized managers even more than they did star players. But as free agency took hold, Miller says, managers became more like mid-level corporate executives than the unquestioned rulers they were when Weaver was coming up.
There, too, lie some interesting paradoxes. While Weaver got away with chewing out his players — and even threatening to hit them — Miller learned he was remarkably good at knowing what motivated both individual athletes and the team as a whole.
“In all kinds of ways he was messy,” says Miller. “He had a drinking problem. … But he had a very smart way of dealing with players and all these players would tell me he was the greatest manager they ever had. He treated them like men. He didn't baby them. He let them speak their mind. He didn't try to control them. He didn't backstab them to the media. He didn't have hard and fast rules except for being on time and playing hard. And he didn't hold grudges. That was a big thing. He would chew you out one day. The next day you were free to come play your hardest.”
Weaver routinely won more than 90 games a year and in his career compiled a .583 winning percentage, the best among managers with more than 1,000 wins since divisional play began.
“There's no other team where you can tie that much success to one guy,” says Miller. “I mean, [the Orioles] were basically a mediocre franchise before. And they've basically been a mediocre franchise since. And so their glory is really tied to this one guy."
