MIKE BURKE
Allegany Communications Sports
Part 1 of John W. Miller’s brilliant biography of the brilliant Earl Weaver, “The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball,” opens on that fateful Sunday afternoon in October of 1982 when Weaver bid a tearful farewell to Baltimore, and Baltimore a loud and heartfelt farewell to him (or so we thought), as the manager of the beloved “Birds of Baltimore,” as Howard Cosell called them that day.
Part 2 takes us to spring training of 1952 when Weaver was a legitimate prospect for the St. Louis Cardinals and explains to us just how close he came to making it to the big leagues as a player.
Spoiler alert: He got hosed.
From there, Miller takes us to St. Louis, where the Earl Weaver journey begins and where Earl’s dreams of becoming a big leaguer begin to take shape in ways you might not suspect – yet, thanks to the influence of his favorite uncle, Bud Bochert, served as the hook for Weaver becoming the Runyonesque character that he became.
As Miller points out, Uncle Bud’s “lingering effects in Earl’s wiseguy humor, street hustler’s craving for an edge, skill at cards, love of a good wager, and contempt for authority,” became qualities that Bawlmer, hon grew to love about Earl Weaver the most.
No wonder, then, the book’s first words are “All life is six-to-five against,” by Damon Runyon himself, though Earl Weaver didn’t have “no stats” on Runyon – or on God for that matter, as we learn in the book.
“The Last Manager” has become my favorite baseball book, and I’ve seemingly read them all (not really), because Miller writes and reports on the life and times of the brilliant manager with the same honesty and affection that any person who has been an Orioles fan since 1965 carries in his or her heart for Earl Weaver.
In fact, when I realized the book opened in Memorial Stadium on Sunday, October 3, 1982, I had to take a deep breath before starting because that day was at once the saddest and most remarkable day I had ever experienced in a ballpark – until, that is, Sunday, October 6, 1991, when Earl Weaver became the final Oriole to take the field at Memorial Stadium.
I cried at Memorial Stadium more than I’ve cried in my own home, and I’ve had some bad relationships. Yet Miller’s description of Memorial Stadium and that splendid neighborhood of Waverly on pages 112 and 113 – perfect and beautiful – took me back there after all these years with the same melancholy and with the same sights, sounds, smells and feelings being as fresh in my senses as they were then.
And at the heart of it all was Earl Weaver, the kid from St. Louis who became the forever Earl of Baltimore, and of whom Miller writes, “represented Charm City as well as Mencken, blue crabs and red-brick houses. A tough little man with a chip on his shoulder standing up to the blue-blooded bullies from New York and Boston.”
As Miller points out early, clearly Earl Weaver was not the last manager, but he was the very best manager of the last era when front offices believed they needed a larger-than-life leader to build a great team around.
“Earl Weaver reigned supreme – the only manager to last with one team during the 1970s – when baseball managers were American royalty and powerful operators within the game, sometimes bigger stars than their players,” Miller wrote. “In July 1983, Earl Weaver was the Playboy magazine interview of the month. (“Baseball’s rowdy genius,” the cover called him.) Other Playboy interview subjects in 1983 included writer Gabriel García Márquez, who’d just won the Nobel Prize for literature, media mogul and CNN founder Ted Turner, bestselling author Stephen King, actor Paul Newman, and photographer Ansel Adams. That was the level of fame, and cultural relevancy, that Earl Weaver, a baseball manager, occupied.”
Earl Weaver’s genius was real and he was decades ahead of his time in how he saw and managed baseball, having become the Dr. Frankenstein who created today’s baseball monster known as analytics.
He had very few rules for his players – be on time, play hard, wear a necktie on team flights (much to the chagrin of Reggie Jackson) and stay out of the hotel bar, because that’s were the coaches drink – yet had 10 rules for being a manager, with one of his most important being, “If you don’t make any promises to your players, you won’t have to break them.”
He wouldn’t allow himself to get close to his players, which took an emotional toll, because he knew one day he was the one who would have to tell them they were through. He fought with his players, and his players fought with him, with prodigal son Jim Palmer being at the forefront. Yet each player is on the record as saying Earl Weaver never held a grudge. He just wanted to win.
Some players who hated Weaver’s guts during the time they played for him – prominent players, star players – speak glowingly and admirably of how he helped to create, then run the operation known as The Oriole Way, because, despite their personal differences, Earl Weaver made it clear that he believed in them.
If you are a baseball fan, most notably an Orioles fan, do not waste one more moment to read John W. Miller’s “The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball.”
For an Orioles fan in particular, Miller’s masterpiece provides a proud sense of acknowledgement. As “The Last Manager” is the first genuine Weaver biography, now the rest of the world knows what we’ve known all along.
I laughed a lot reading this book. But, truthfully, I was wiping my eyes and sniffling through most of it, because just as it was with Earl Weaver’s career and then his life, I just didn’t want it to end.
Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X @MikeBurkeMDT