Earl Weaver and baseball’s balance between stories and statistics
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.)
