The Earl of Baltimore, carrying the underdog vibe on his shoulders

Orioles fans of a certain age remember him as distinctly as an odd neighbor from childhood, the backyard know-it-all who could argue the world flat or round; a character as vivid as an excitable grandfather who enjoyed a few cold ones. Then a few more. And then, look out!

“I remember Bill Taylor watching the games down in his club basement” near St. Agnes Hospital, said Kerry Oberdalhoff Lessard, granddaughter of the late Sunpapers truck driver.

“Pop would get pissed off about a call against the Orioles and eject himself from his La-Z-Boy so hard I thought he flew. He’d say a few curse words, his white hair all crazy and we’d tell him he was acting like Earl.”

Earl . . .

Do I really need to say his last name?

The feisty bantam, self-professed “sorest loser who ever lived” and manager of the greatest Orioles teams since major league ball returned to Crabtown in 1954. Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver (1930-2013) but never as deep and wide as the new biography—The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented and Reinvented Baseball —by John W. Miller.

“I think the book moved the needle on almost every part of Earl’s life,” said Miller, a veteran journalist and high school baseball coach in Pittsburgh. “I’ve been curious about him since reading [Thomas] Boswell’s baseball columns as a boy growing up in Brussels. I was following my own desire for more.”

More about Earl Sidney Weaver from the rough side of Depression-era St. Louis is what The Last Manager has in abundance. It is, perhaps, the best baseball book since Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, published in 1970 when Earl captured his only World Series championship, a 4 games to 1 defeat of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine.

It was a time when poet Dean Bartoli Smith took refuge from his parents’ rancorous divorce by watching Earl command the Orange & Black on black-and-white TV, home alone and wounded, lost in the wonder of baseball. 

To make amends, Dean’s father would take him to 33rd street to see a field of future Hall of Famers play ball on a verdant horseshoe called Memorial Stadium.

“Getting splinters in the bleachers during a game against the Red Sox when Earl covered the plate in dirt and stomped around like an unhinged rooster,” said Smith. “Just his presence in the dugout was an eternal middle finger to the Yankees and Boston and the umpires. He carried the underdog vibe of the city on his shoulders.”

Weaver’s peculiarities and stats—1,480 lifetime wins for a .583 percentage— have been the delight of sportswriters since he took over as Orioles manager after the 1968 All Star break. He was ejected from both games of a doubleheader three times and twice got the heave-ho before the first pitch was thrown.

Easy enough to find in a handful of books already published, including Earl’s 1982 memoir It’s What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts. Miller gives plausible context to all of it by meticulously plumbing darkness haunting Earl since childhood, an ugliness that made Weaver the difficult man he was. The son of a dry cleaner, he grew up  in a family of gamblers, bookies, hustlers and roughnecks.

You think your family is dysfunctional? Earl’s favorite uncle, a street level thug named Bud Bochert, shot his wife in the caboose and they stayed married!

“Nobody had figured out the truth about Bud, a baseball bookie and violent mobster who took Weaver to ballgames in St Louis when he was a boy,” said Miller. “Weaver loved to gamble. It’s clear he saw decision-making through the prism of odds and probabilities. He talked like a bookmaker, according to one baseball executive. All that came from Uncle Bud. As did the darker, sadder, more violent sides of Earl.”

The darkness began to congeal at age 22 when he was robbed—truly screwed in an underhanded move by the reviled Eddie Stanky—of the chance to make it to the Show. Instead, he spent two decades in the minor leagues as player and manager.

By his own admission, Weaver was a problem drinker. In the late 1930s, about the time Earl was hitting baseballs in his backyard in knee pants, a group of shrinks made a study of alcoholics to discern what personality traits they had in common.

Their conclusions fit Earl like a well-worn jersey: Childishness, over-sensitivity, and grandiosity.

“I don’t think anybody had tackled his drinking as bluntly before,” said Miller. “I found a magazine piece from 1974 detailing how the Orioles were frustrated by what a mess he was but couldn’t fire him because he was so good.”

Miller also dispelled a long-held belief by the Orioles fan base that Weaver couldn’t play the game, an untruth gleefully perpetrated by his own players. “The only thing Earl knows about pitching,” said Dave McNally, the only pitcher to hit a grand slam in the World Series, “is that he couldn’t hit it.”

Not so. Despite his size—opposing teams would taunt him with chants of “Mickey Rooney” —Earl was a good athlete who starred in three sports in high school and named Most Valuable Player in three of his first minor league seasons.

“He really was a prospect,” said Miller. “Signed at 17 with real qualities like his batting eye, sure hands, and bat to ball skills.”

That surprised even some of the biggest Orioles fans who read the book, including longtime Orioles beer vendor Greg Schwalenberg, who read it twice.

“He led the minors in batting back in St. Louis,” said Schwalenberg, who sold beer at Memorial Stadium and Camden Yards for 40 years and now works for the Maryland Zoo. “He should have made the Cardinals in ’52 but if he had, history would have changed.”

Earl Weaver retired in 1982 before an ill-advised (and unsuccessful) return to the dugout for the 1985 and 1986 seasons. He died of a heart attack in 2013 on a baseball cruise where fans could meet their heroes. But there has never been an Orioles hero as beloved as Brooks Robinson and Earl knew it.

September 18, 1977 was “Thanks Brooks” day at Memorial Stadium, the year that No. 5 retired. When it was Earl’s turn to speak, he brushed back tears.

“I’d like to be like Brooks. The guys who never said no to nobody, the ones that everybody loves because they deserve to be loved. Those are my heroes …”

Yes, Earl could be a sonofabitch. But no one who ever sat in Section 34 of Memorial Stadium during the glory days could deny that they didn’t love the little bastard.

Rafael Alvarez has been an Orioles fan since the Birds swept the Dodgers in the 1966 World Series. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com. “The Last Manager” is available at the Ivy Bookshop, 5928 Falls Road in Baltimore.