Book Review: John W. Miller's The Last Manager

There's a reason the new Earl Weaver biography is knocking on the door of the bestseller lists. If you thought you knew everything about the Orioles' Hall of Fame manager, think again.

As a manager back in the day, Earl Weaver helped push Baltimore’s baseball franchise to the forefront of the American conversation. The Orioles never basked in the limelight more than when Weaver was in charge, leading them to four pennants, a World Series victory and a long run of winning seasons between 1968 and 1982.

Now, more than a decade after his death, Weaver is again bringing attention to the Orioles — the history of the Orioles. The Last Manager, a new, revelatory biography of the Hall of Fame skipper, authored by journalist John W. Miller, is knocking on the door of the bestseller lists.

Published earlier this week, the book has been praised by the New York Times and excerpted in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Few books generate that kind of attention, let me assure you.

The Last Manager deserves it.

It has already received enough praise that it doesn’t need more from me to validate it, but I think my experience with the book helps underscore its strengths.

I’ve been in touch with Miller for the past year, since I debuted the Bird Tapes on Substack last spring. The Bird Tapes is built around interviews I collected for my oral history of the Orioles, From 33rd Street to Camden Yards, published in 2001, and Miller found them useful as he researched and wrote his book. He has supported the Bird Tapes from the outset, which I appreciate. (I’ll announce my plans for Year Two of the Bird Tapes next week. Some good stuff coming.)

Last fall, Miller sent me an advance version of the book to check out. I figured it’d be good because Miller is a seasoned reporter who’d spent five years exploring Weaver’s life, but I wondered if how much he’d discovered that I didn’t already know. I never covered Weaver on a daily basis, but I did interview him at length for my oral history and sat with him many times when I was a Baltimore Sun columnist. (He would come around at spring training.) I’d listened to countless others from his era regale me with stories about him. And what stories they were.

Basically, I thought I had knew Weaver’s life story. But then I started reading The Last Manager, and as I turned the pages, I kept saying, “I didn’t know that … I didn’t know that … I didn’t know that …”

It turned out there was a whole lot about him that I didn’t know. As a young man, he was a far better player than popular legend suggests; a stroke of bad luck, not his performance, was what kept from being a major leaguer. His approach to life was influenced in no small part, and in both good and dubious ways, by a mobster uncle who took him under his wing when he was growing up in St. Louis. He evolved in profound ways as he grew in adulthood and fame.

This book is what happens when a good reporter does what he does naturally, digs deep and talks to more sources than he needs. There’s always unexplored terrain in the lives of very public figures. Miller found it.

The book also succeeds because Miller, who played college baseball at Mount St. Mary’s and now coaches a high school team in Pittsburgh, loves the game and can pinpoint where Weaver fits into the great sweep of the sport’s history. He ruled at a time when the good managers lorded over their teams with guts, instinct, personality and individual philosophy, before the data-centric guys with their spreadsheets took over so much of the decision-making.

I’m not going to reveal any more because I want you to read the book and enjoy the experience of being surprised to discover more about someone you thought you already knew. But I’ll say this: If you were a Weaver fan, root for the Orioles or simply are curious about what made their brilliant, profane, complex, irascible, funny, theatrical, greatest-ever manager tick, this is a book for you.

A couple of nights ago, Miller was in downtown Baltimore to discuss and promote The Last Manager at the Enoch Pratt Library’s Central branch on Cathedral Street. I was on stage with him, moderating the event. A great crowd showed up. The bookseller on hand sold every copy of the book it had brought.

It was a great night for the author, but also, a great night for Earl. He was back in the limelight. You could almost smell his cigarette smoke.

(Click here to watch my conversation with John W. Miller at the Pratt.)