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

by John W. Miller

Earl Weaver reigned supreme—the only manager to last with one team during the entire 1970s—when baseball managers were American royalty and powerful operators within the game, sometimes bigger stars than their players.

Earl might terrorize umpires, fight his players, and cuss, drink, and smoke to excess, but he was also a curious, charming, and sensitive man who gardened, cooked, and played ukulele. He loved poodles and Elvis. And despite his abuse of the King’s English, he was full of wisdom.

With Weaver’s encouragement, the Orioles rebooted the Kangaroo Court, a role-playing game they had employed in 1966, and then abandoned as the team slumped, that gave players a forum for admitting mistakes and being vulnerable. Acting as judge, Frank Robinson stuck a mop on his head, a scene imitated much more recently by the hit TV show Ted Lasso.

“You can’t run a few plays into the line and kill the clock,” said Weaver, mustering wisdom still quoted in the twenty-first century. “You got to give the other man his chance at bat. This is why this is the greatest game of them all.”

Cuellar flew with lucky blue clothes, insisted on eating his pregame meal with his catcher, and smoked nine cigarettes during games, one per inning. He hung a sign over his locker that said: “Bring it sweetheart.” He sat on the lucky end of his training table and made the same number of steps between the dugout and the water cooler every time. None of that bothered Earl, who was almost as superstitious as Crazy Horse. Weaver avoided looking at clocks if the Orioles were leading, changed pens after each loss, and preferred to rest his foot against the “good-luck” pole in the Memorial Stadium dugout.

Umpires tossed Weaver out of 96 games, fourth all-time, but he managed in fewer games than everybody else in the top five. He is the only manager to get tossed from both games of a doubleheader twice. The only men in the top ten with a higher ejection rate are Frisch, whom Weaver saw play as a boy in St. Louis, and his old Orioles boss, Paul Richards.

And in the reported scenes and dialogues, fans got extra entertainment. “I’d like to read your rule book,” Weaver screamed during one fight in 1967 with Triple-A umpire Paul Nicolai. “You can’t read,” Nicolai shot back. “Not your book,” Weaver retorted. “It’s in Braille.”

Weaver told reporters that the radar gun’s best use was measuring not sheer velocity but the difference in speeds between pitches. “If the guy’s fastball comes in at 88, and his slider comes in at 88, too, that’s no good. You’d want the slider a little slower, maybe 82. That’s what makes the batter hesitate and stick his butt out.”

“Earl was the first guy to use the radar guns to make in-game decisions,” said Dan Duquette, a general manager for the Expos, Red Sox, and Orioles who started his baseball career with the Brewers in 1980 and observed a scout with a radar gun giving Weaver hand signals to indicate velocity. He asked Weaver what he was doing. Weaver responded: “Danny, I’m trying to figure out if my pitcher is done for the day before the hitter tells me by hitting a three-run homer.”

Reggie, meanwhile, was loving playing for Earl. His assessment: “Earl Weaver smokes too much and drinks too much. He has a voice that sounds like broken glass. He is short, feisty, has a ferocious temper, especially with umpires, and doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. He has never been accused of being a diplomat and has never set out to win any popularity contests with his players. He is also one of the few baseball geniuses I’ve ever met.”

When Earl cursed, said Reggie, “it was like poetry.” Jackson also said Weaver was a “crazed munchkin” who was “funnier and more fun than anybody I’ve ever been around.” More soberly, Jackson reflected: “I loved the little Weave. If you made a mental mistake, you saw him waiting for you on the top step of the dugout when you came back in. He’d just say one word, ‘Why?’ And you better have an answer. On his team, if you didn’t ‘think the game,’ you had a problem.”

Weaver prided himself on his mastery of the rule book, and sometimes it won games for the Orioles. On June 29, the Orioles were leading Cleveland 3–2 with two out and runners on first and second in the bottom of the ninth. Rich Dauer threw a ground ball into the dugout. Two runners scored. Cleveland celebrated its victory. Not so fast. The runner on first was not supposed to score. The rule states that runners get two bases from the base they were on when the ball was pitched. “I had two pieces of chicken and my pants off,” said Brooks Robinson. After Weaver pointed out the rule, the umpires ordered the teams back on the field. The Orioles held Cleveland in the ninth inning and won 5–3 in the tenth.

One of the players’ favorite moves was making a honking collective sound directed at Earl: Wa-Wa-Wa. They competed for who could imitate his raspy voice the best. John Lowenstein or Rick Dempsey would stand in the front of the team bus and rasp: “Can’t somebody make the fucking ball hit the outfield grass! Catch the fucking ball!” Every week, they voted for “The Son of the Week,” the player they perceived to have been Weaver’s favorite. Weaver loved the mockery, because it defused tension and kept the players loose. “He saw guys pulling together in a certain way, maybe against him, but that’s exactly what he wanted,” said Flanagan. “We were very tight. We had a common bond in a certain way, and that was to handle this time bomb in the dugout.”

In 1979, during a game in Cleveland, Weaver ran onto the field with a rule book, claiming that a runner had interfered with Dempsey’s fielding on a bunt. Weaver opened the book at the page dealing with interference. Larry Barnett tossed him. Weaver ripped the book into shreds of paper, littering the infield. He picked up pieces and handed them to another umpire. Players in both dugouts howled with laughter. The crowd of 34,333 went wild. To a standing ovation, Weaver tipped his hat and left the field. The Orioles won, 8–7. “There ain’t no rule that says you can’t bring a rule book on the field,” fumed Weaver. “I told them guys that they made the wrong call. I told them it was in black and white. They wouldn’t look so I ripped it up and it was all over the field in black and white.” Sounding like a repentant serial killer, he added that it was “the first time” he’d ever ripped up a rule book, “and I hope I don’t ever do it again.”

Shelton based the famous scene in Bull Durham where Kevin Costner beefs with the umpire on Earl Weaver’s argument with Haller. CRASH: It was a cocksucking call! UMPIRE: Did you call me a cocksucker? CRASH: No! I said it was a cocksucking call and you can’t run me for that! UMPIRE: You missed the tag! CRASH: You spit on me! UMPIRE: I didn’t spit on you! CRASH: You’re in the wrong business, Jack—you’re Sears, Roebuck material!

“Nobody understood percentage baseball better than Earl Weaver. Nobody,” he said. “Players liked him because they knew that he could help them. They knew that he knew his shit, and that he was on them to get the best out of them as a ballplayer. He was a crusty bastard, but I believe his only intent was to make the ballplayers as good as they could be.”