John W. Miller, author of the bestselling Earl Weaver biography, tells me what surprised him as he researched the legendary manager’s life.
Twelve years since his death at age 82 on an Orioles-themed cruise, Earl Weaver is once again prominent in the national baseball conversation.
Yes, he’s always prominent because he was so ahead of his time and so adept at the job of managing the Orioles, which he did for 2,541 games between 1968 and 1986. Although baseball has undergone dramatic changes since Weaver’s heyday, many tenets of his managerial philosophy, considered groundbreaking at the time, are still relevant and debated in major league clubhouses and front offices.
But the spotlight on Weaver is especially bright now because the best baseball book of 2025 was a new biography of the legendary manager, authored by John W. Miller, a former Wall Street Journal reporter.
Miller’s The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball contains tons of new biographical material on Weaver and places him in context historically, in the process deftly painting baseball as a game in transition in many ways — quite a feat. The book debuted on the bestseller lists and continues to generate acclaim. During a MASN game broadcast last summer, Kevin Brown praised it as an eye-opening read for any Oriole fan interested in the club’s history, which, of course, is what I’m all about here at the Bird Tapes. Just last month, the book won Spitball Magazine’s CASEY Award, honoring the best baseball book of 2025.
If you thought you knew everything about Weaver, you’re in for a delightful surprise.
I’ll admit, I’m biased. Miller used From 33rd Street to Camden Yards, my 2001 oral history of the Orioles, as a reference source, and he has wholeheartedly supported the Bird Tapes. He authored an article for the site before the book came out — an essay about his experience. He asked me to read a pre-pub version of the manuscript and we went back and forth on some details as he finished it up and went through fact-checking.
When Miller’s promotional tour brought him to Baltimore last March for an appearance at the Enoch Pratt Library, I served as the moderator. Listening to him field questions that evening from members of the large audience that came to hear him, I resolved to arrange an interview with Miller and add it to the Bird Tapes archive. Although he’s too young to have covered Weaver, he is now the reigning expert on Weaver’s upbringing, playing career, managerial influences, personal and professional relationships, etc.
Given what he now knows about someone who is, let’s face it, the central character in Orioles history, I’d be selling the Bird Tapes community short if I didn’t add an interview with Miller to the archive.
So … here it is.
Below is a listener’s guide to what we discussed during our conversation, which is available to both free and paid subscribers. I strongly suggest checking it out to learn more about Weaver.
Here’s the listener’s guide:
Miller didn’t expect to find out so much about Weaver that was previously unknown, most prominently the influence of his Uncle Bud, whom Miller describes as a low-level mobster in St. Louis, where Weaver grew up. Miller also was surprised to discover that Weaver actually was a pretty good ballplayer in his day and probably would have reached the major leagues if not for a raw deal he received from his hometown Cardinals and player-manager Eddie Stanky in 1952.
Weaver oversaw the Orioles in an era when baseball managers were important and famous, which is no longer the case. Thus the title of the book.
As a player, Weaver had good hands at second base and a good batting eye, which produced a high on-base percentage throughout his career in the minors. Although he didn’t have a great arm or much power, he would have been an analytics darling because of his high walk rate, Miller says. If he’d gotten a chance to play in the majors, Miller says, it would have changed him as a manager because some of his fire was built on the failure and insecurity he experienced while playing. When he didn’t make the majors, it deeply wounded him, Miller says. Weaver grew up in what Miller calls a “dark environment” and never truly conquered the darkness.
Miller describes Weaver’s origins as a manager after he was discovered by Orioles farm director Harry Dalton in 1956. His fire was evident early as minor league executives complained to Dalton about his disruptive behavior with umpires and opponents. But his talent also was evident, Miller says, because his teams posted winning records every year. Miller uses Weaver’s handling of minor league pitching legend Steve Dalkowski to illustrate his knack for knowing how to handle players. The success that Steve Stone and John Lowenstein enjoyed in the majors under Weaver also exemplifies that knack, Miller says,
Although he managed great teams in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Weaver did his best work in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Miller says, when he continued to field winning teams with rosters of “parts” after the Orioles suffered major losses in free agency. According to Miller, Weaver doesn’t get enough credit for his masterful approach to pitching, which helped Oriole pitchers win six Cy Young awards during his time as manager. He demanded that his pitchers throw strikes, change speeds and induce contact to maximize the great defense behind them.
Miller describes Weaver’s 1-3 record as a World Series manager as “kind of a fluke” attributable at least partly to bad luck. The fact that the 1979 team didn’t win it all is especially heartbreaking, Miller says, because the team was special. His biggest challenge with the book was figuring out how to how to write about Weaver’s alcoholism. The Orioles considered firing Weaver every year because of it, Miller says.
Although Weaver didn’t go to college, he was very smart. Miller says. In the last scene in the book, Weaver is the center of attention in 1991 during the on-field ceremony after the last game at Memorial Stadium, which summed up his influence on the franchise. Although Weaver grew up around gambling thanks to Uncle Bud and instinctively utilized gambling-centric probability theory as a manager, Miller says there’s no evidence he bet on games.
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