Review: Earl Weaver and baseball’s balance between stories and statistics
Earl Weaver in a familiar posture in an undated photo. (Wikimedia Commons)Baseball fans too young to remember the Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver (1930-2013) are of two minds about the man. It all depends on whether they like baseball for the stories or for the statistics.
The ones who like stories like Earl Weaver, the cartoon character—the one whose mic’d up tête-à-tête with umpire Bill Haller ended with the famous “you’re a liar, Earl / no, you are” back and forth; the one who exploded on cue when teaching Bob Uecker how to argue with the umpire on “This Week in Baseball”; the one whose profane responses to reader questions on the “Manager’s Corner” radio program have become the stuff of memes. Viewed through these 2025 eyes, Earl Weaver is Donald Duck in a baseball uniform.
The statistically minded baseball fan may like Earl Weaver even more. He is their voice calling out from the wilderness of the pastime’s past. Before Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game became baseball catechism, Earl Weaver was a self-taught baseball statistician whose intuitive sense for the game foreshadowed the findings of advanced analytics, commonly referred to as “sabermetrics.” Personality-wise, Weaver was a throwback to the curmudgeonly managers of the 19th and 20th centuries; but as a manager, he was a window to the game’s third century.
John W. Miller, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and a contributing writer for America, marries stories and statistics in this fascinating account of the diminutive, cantankerous skipper who is the winningest manager since the moon landing. During his first run with the O’s (1968-82), Weaver never had a losing season, and he won six division titles, four pennants and a World Series. His only losing season was his last one (1986), part of a two-year return to the dugout that resembled the “Hundred Days” of his doppelgänger, Napoleon Bonaparte.
The stories abound: a boozin’, brawlin’, chainsmokin’ two-decade odyssey through the minor leagues as a player and a manager; the 96 ejections from the game that made Weaver the crown prince of old Memorial Stadium, including the two occasions when he got tossed from both games in a doubleheader; his love-hate relationships with players and management; and, most interestingly, his rough childhood in Depression-era St. Louis, which proved to be great preparation for adult superstardom in a similarly gritty city that also sat in the shadow of a more esteemed metropolis. (Baltimore, in fact, sits in the shadow of two, “a traffic jam between New York and Washington,” in the words of the Baltimore filmmaker Barry Levinson.)
Miller includes plenty of discussion of Weaver’s proto-analytic prowess as well. He was the first big-league manager to make regular use of a radar gun to measure a pitcher’s velocity. He made his pitchers throw strikes and expected his fielders not to beat the team with mental or physical errors. Weaver stopped bunting because he viewed such small-ball tactics as wasted outs. He built his batting orders through attention to statistical detail, trying to maximize the offensive output and defensive performance of his lineups.
Electronic Arts cemented Weaver’s reputation as the thinking man’s manager when they tapped him in 1986 to help develop the first-ever baseball simulation video game, Earl Weaver Baseball. Weaver taught the programmers from Electronic Arts (whose EA Sports division became the first name in sports video games) the ins and outs of the sport, which they incorporated into the game. Earl Weaver Baseballis among the most critically acclaimed video games of all time and had a significant influence on the strategic development of how the game is played on actual diamonds.
Miller roots Weaver’s statistical savoir faire in a story. One of the bright spots in Weaver’s difficult childhood was his close relationship with his Uncle Bud, who brought him often to ball games at St. Louis’s Sportsman’s Park, home of the Cardinals and Browns (who, incidentally, moved to Baltimore in 1954 and became the Orioles). Bud Bochert just so happened to be a bookmaker and an associate of Al Capone. Bochert took bets on all manner of athletic pursuits, including baseball. Miller makes a convincing case that Weaver’s bookmaking uncle cultivated the youngster’s analytical eye for the game.
“Young Earl Weaver didn’t just watch baseball; he analyzed it, via the sport’s daily roulette wheel of precise, probabilistic outcomes,” Miller writes in “Gangs of St. Louis,” the book’s most compelling chapter.
Weaver enjoyed casting lots and making wagers throughout his life, though there is no indication he ever bet on baseball.
Baltimore proved to be the perfect base of operations for the boisterous Weaver, and not just because of the presence of Pimlico Racetrack. Few places glory in their rough-around-the-edges reputation as thoroughly as the city by the (Chesapeake) Bay. At times, Weaver’s on-field antics seemed straight out of a skit about “Charm City.”
Then and now, Baltimore was a pro football town. The Colts and now the Ravens have been loved more broadly and deeply than the Orioles ever were. Nevertheless, no coach in the history of either Baltimore professional football franchise garnered love like Weaver. Whether it was Weeb Ewbank or Ted Marchibroda, Brian Billick or John Harbaugh, they just didn’t seem as Baltimore as the little ruffian from St. Louis.
Football and basketball coaches seem particularly taken with the notion of sports having a deeper meaning than what the scoreboard says. The likes of Vince Lombardi, John Wooden, Mike Krzyzewski and Lou Holtz exemplify the sports-as-moral-enterprise coaching ethos. And in Matt Hoven’s Hockey Priest (2024), the author chronicles the life of the Rev. David Bauer, founder of the Canadian national hockey team. Bauer treated sports as his ministry, a space for uplift, gentlemanly conduct and a vehicle through which young men could gain access to higher education. Even a football coach like Bill Belichick, who is known to bend a rule or two, glories in the order and discipline of his sport.
Not so for Weaver, who did not present the game as a character-building exercise. It may be that baseball, with its historic lack of timekeeping and relatively pastoral gameplay, is not well suited for the kind of spiritual formation that the likes of the Fordham-educated Vince Lombardi instilled in his charges. It could also be that the summerlong life-on-the-road grind of a professional baseball player mixes poorly with the deliberate enterprise of character building. When one looks at the list of baseball’s great managers, few of the names jump out as figures of moral uplift. Certain players (think Christy Mathewson, Jackie Robinson and Honus Wagner) exemplified classical virtue and diligence, but not a lot of big-league skippers.
The closest comparison to Weaver among the game’s pantheon of managers may be John McGraw, who cut his teeth as a player with the original Baltimore Orioles of the 1890s. McGraw shared Weaver’s irascibility and perennial playing of all the angles to win. He, too, was a strategic innovator who cut against the grain of the baseball nostrums of his age. Miller, too, makes the comparison of Weaver to McGraw, noting that Weaver himself would have liked the juxtaposition.
Throughout, Miller’s admiration for his subject comes through in this superb portrait of one of baseball’s most significant and interesting figures.
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