Books: “The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball”
I recently finished reading The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball* by John W. Miller.
Long time Baltimore Orioles’ manager Earl Weaver is best remembered as a feisty, larger-than-life (but smaller than most men) character, going literally toe-to-toe with MLB umpires in legendary rants that fans loved and journalists loved to write about.
But this chain-smoking, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed cartoon character was also a Baseball genius ahead of his time. Long before the era of Moneyball and Sabermetrics, Weaver prioritized pitching, defense, on-base percentage, and the importance of making every single out count.