Miller Pens Excellent Biography of Baseball’s Diminutive Giant: Manager Earl Weaver

Though he couldn’t keep his job after the Pittsburgh Pirates spun their wheels to begin the 2025 season, former skipper Derek Shelton could recognize the baseball man who best embodied the qualities needed for success: the legendary Earl Weaver. In his best-selling biography of the Baltimore Orioles’ Hall of Famer, The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball, Pittsburgh’s John W. Miller uses the kind of clear-eyed writing gained from his 30 years as a Wall Street Journal reporter to reflect on the considerable footprint No. 4 left on America’s pastime. It’s a legacy of success Weaver earned, according to Shelton, by having “command and control of the game and his players … this is what a leader looks like.”

Characterized by a love for the sport that was cultivated by hard work and his supportive working-class parents, Weaver, a St. Louis native, became “a tough little man with a chip on his shoulder.” To those of us who remember how This Week in Baseball colored Saturday afternoon TV, the diminutive and irascible Earl Weaver was best known for clips of his epic dustups with umpires, rather than for his genius in the dugout. But according to Miller, few names “echo through baseball history quite like Weaver’s.” Indeed, of all the managers who’ve won 1,000 games or more, none has a higher winning percentage than Weaver. Perhaps it’s also why Billy Beane of Moneyball-fame claimed he wanted “the next Earl Weaver as manager” because “consciously or not, he understood mathematics and probability.”

An elite second baseman in the St. Louis Cardinals system, Weaver was one of only 40 players invited to camp in March 1952, “a bona fide prospect” and a “sure bet” for the majors. The irony comes when Weaver was blocked by his minor-league manager, the light-hitting Eddie Stanky. He’d never played a game in the big leagues, beginning a nearly 15-year stint in the minors, where he’d learn to observe the game in a way that the eminent baseball writer Tom Verducci described as Copernican, because “Weaver understood smart baseball a generation before it was empirically demonstrated.” That legacy lives on as a three-run homer is called an “Earl Weaver special,” and the bunt has become seldom used because of Weaver’s enduring management philosophy: “Just remember you only have 27 outs. … Don’t waste any of them.”

But if Weaver’s beliefs about how the game should be played looked to the future, his confrontational interaction with players and umpires would be considered obsolete, even by himself, upon reflection. Of all his antagonistic relationships with players, his time spent managing Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer stands out. Weaver himself thanked Palmer in his Cooperstown speech, saying, “The gentleman and I had more arguments than my wife, Marianna.” With some players hating his guts, and one trying to convert him to Evangelical Christianity, his longtime catcher, Rick Dempsey, opined, “One thing about Earl, we hated him a lot of the time, but at the end of the day you loved him because he was a winner.” Weaver was reciprocal in his praise as he grew softer in retirement, claiming it was the many stars he managed, like Brooks Robinson, Eddie Murray and Cal Ripken Jr., who made him look good: “Those boys are the ones that put me in.”

It’s a sentiment Miller surely understands, having grown up in Brussels, Belgium, taking two teams from that tiny country to the Little League World Series, becoming a scout for the Orioles, and guiding the Taylor Allderdice varsity baseball team to the playoffs and a 14-6 record.The Last Manager is a “book for everybody” and his writing is a pleasant balance of history, stats and insights from legendary baseball writers like Roger Angell and Tom Boswell, who have a knack for prose. Angell called Weaver “the best naked talker I ever heard,” which may have been due to purple language and honesty, or the fact that Weaver often conducted post-game interviews after a shower.

There’s also a pop culture angle to Weaver that Miller weaves into the book. The first is that an Orioles minor-league infielder, Ron Shelton, turned the stories of Weaver and the legendary but wayward talent of Steve Dalkowski, who had “one of those arms that come once in a lifetime,” into the seminal baseball movie, Bull Durham. The other is that before the towering presence of NFL Madden Football in the gaming landscape, EA Sports released Earl Weaver Baseball in 1987, breaking new ground for realism, use of trades, and inclusion of Negro League teams.

By the end of The Last Manager, readers will be left with a better understanding of Weaver’s erratic behavior that endeared him to fan and foe alike. There’s also the truth of his team’s losing to the Pirates in two World Series and the insight provided by another managerial legend, Casey Stengel, who once said, “Managing is getting paid for home runs someone else hits.”