The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball

by John W. Miller Narrated by Not Yet Available

Overview

“Baseball books don't get any better than this...Earl Weaver has at last been given his due.” -George F. Will

The first major biography of legendary Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver-who has been described as “the Copernicus of baseball” and “the grandfather of the modern game”-The Last Manager is a wild, thrilling, and hilarious ride with baseball's most underappreciated genius, and one of its greatest characters.

Long before the Moneyball-era, the Earl of Baltimore reigned over baseball. History's feistiest and most colorful manager, Earl Weaver transformed the sport by collecting and analyzing data in visionary ways, ultimately winning more games than anybody else during his time running the Orioles from 1968-1982.

When Weaver was hired by the Orioles, managers were still seen as coaches and inspirational leaders, more teachers of the game than strategists. Weaver invented new ways of building baseball teams, prioritizing on-base average, elite defense, and strike throwing. Weaver was the first manager to use a modern radar gun, and he pioneered the use of analytical data. By moving 6'4” Cal Ripken, Jr. to shortstop, Weaver paved the way for a generation of plus-sized superstar shortstops, including Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter. He foreshadowed almost everything that Bill James, Billy Beane, Theo Epstein, and hundreds of other big brain baseball types would later present as innovation.

Beyond being a great baseball mind, Weaver was a rare baseball character. Major League Baseball is show business, and Weaver understood how much of his job was entertainment. Weaver's outbursts offered players cathartic relief from their own frustration, signaled his concern for the team, and fired up fans. In his frequent arguments with umpires, he hammed it up for the crowds, faked heart attacks, ripped bases out of the ground, and pretended to toss umpires out of the game. Weaver also fought with his players, especially Jim Palmer, but that creative tension contributed to a stunning success, and a hilarious clubhouse. During his tenure as major league manager, the Orioles won the American League pennant in 1969, 1970, 1971, and 1979, each time winning over 100 games.

The Last Manager uncovers the story of Weaver's St. Louis childhood with a mobster uncle, his years of minor league heartbreak, and his unlikely road to becoming a big league manager, while tracing the evolution of the game from the old-time baseball of cross-country trains and “desk contracts” to the modern era of free agency, video analysis, and powerful player agents. Weaver's career is a critical juncture in baseball history. He was the only manager to hold a job during the five years leading up to, and five years after, free agency upended baseball in 1976.

Weaver was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1996. In his retirement, he even admitted that “if he had been an umpire, he would have thrown himself out of more games than he actually was.” Belligerent, genius, infamous-The Last Manager tells the story of one man who left his mark on the game for generations.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

PRAISE FOR THE LAST MANAGER:

“Napoleonic in stature and executive style, funnier than Casey Stengel, more successful than any of his contemporaries in Major League dugouts, and arguably the most consequential manager ever, Earl Weaver has at last been given his due. In this rollicking read, John W. Miller gives us the man in full. Weaver would scream at an offending umpire, ‘Are you going to get any better, or is this it?’ Baseball books don’t get any better than this.” —George F. Will

“Earl Weaver was an old school archetype—a heavy drinking, chain smoking, foul mouthed, umpire baiting terror—and a visionary statistical analyst long ahead of his time. John Miller’s fascinating and entertaining portrait shows us how his genius was formed. A great read.” —Ron Shelton, writer and director of Bull Durham

Who Is Earl Weaver?

“Weaver is the grandfather of the modern game. He understood better than anyone in his time the preciousness of the 27 outs (often regarding the sacrifice bunt as a waste of one), the folly of the hit-and-run, the value and symbiosis of pitching and defense, and the importance of batter-pitcher matchups, statistical analysis and on-base percentage. Weaver was the Copernicus of baseball. Just as Copernicus understood heliocentric cosmology a full century before the invention of the telescope, Weaver understood smart baseball a generation before it was empirically demonstrated. . . . Before Moneyball, before Beane, before Bill James—but not quite before Copernicus—Weaver, a white-haired gnome who never played a day of major league baseball, knew what worked. The most recent generation of general managers, armed with their computer printouts and Ivy League–educated assistants, all channel something from the Earl of Baltimore.” —Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated

“Earl Weaver was a manager for all seasons. Some guys are good when they’re got a winning ball club, but when things start to go bad, they don’t know what to do. Or they’re a good manager with a good ball club, but a bad manager with a bad ball club. Or they look like a pretty good manager, but they’ve never been in a pennant race. Earl had everything. He drank his brains out. But he was a fucking genius.” —Frank Cashen, Baltimore Orioles GM 1971–1975

“I made no bones about it when I first got the job: I always wanted the next Earl Weaver as manager.” —Billy Beane, Oakland A’s GM 1997–2015

“He used everybody. Probably more than any other manager in history, Weaver had carefully defined roles for every player on his roster—not because he cared about the players, but because he cared about the games. It was important to Weaver to have a player matched up in his mind with every possible game situation.” —Bill James

“Weaver will remain most famous for his red-faced, hoarsely screaming set-tos with the umps, which produced hilarious photos, thanks to the size differential, but even here he was an intellectual at heart, having discovered that tipping the bill of his cap to one side would allow him to get an inch or two closer to the arbiter’s jaw, without incurring the automatic ejection of the tiniest physical contact. What Earl wanted, what he battled for and talked about and thought about endlessly, was that edge, the single pitch or particular play or minuscule advantage that could turn an inning or a day or a season his way. Long before Billy Ball, he had his coaches keep multicolored pitching and batting charts that told him which of his batters did well or poorly against each righty or lefty flinger in the league, and where on the field well-hit enemy line drives against one of his starters’ or relievers’ sliders or fastballs would probably land.” —Roger Angell, New Yorker

“Weaver marshaled a scholar’s familiarity with the rule book, a statistician’s data, a psychologist’s motivational skills, and a heckler’s needle into a relentless advocacy for the Orioles.” —Bruce Weber, New York Times

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192307762
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	03/18/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged