obligatory YouTube NSFW

my favorite Earl Weaver photo

2013 is here for one ####### specific reason.

Edit.

Edit.

Beat my post. I referenced the Baltimore Sun. This is another classic Earl moment -
Earl and the Umpire . I traveled down to Baltimore to see Earl's last game both times.

One of my favourite baseball managers of all time. He was very wise, if possibly a little too influenced by the Small Sample Size for the purist among saberists.

I can't wait to hear what Jim Palmer says.

Beat my post. I referenced the Baltimore Sun. This is another classic Earl moment -
Earl and the Umpire . I traveled down to Baltimore to see Earl's last game both times.

What I love most about this is that, if you look closely at the scoreboard, it's still the top of the first inning.

Happy Trails, Earl. At least you got to see one more winning, playoff Orioles team before taking off.

Morty, here you go:

http://www.masnsports.com/school_of_roch/2013/01/hall-of-fame-manager-earl-weaver-passes-away.html

"When I looked over at Earl during the Brooks ceremony, he was in tears. It's tragic that he passed away, but not only fans got to celebrate, he got to celebrate a legacy that he was such an important part of."

Thanks. I thought his reaction would be measured but genuinely felt.

From Coot Veal's classic "Manager's Corner" video, linked in #1, I shall transcribe a segment sure to warm the cockles of every Primate's SABR-ey heart:

TOM MARR (Orioles broadcaster): Bill Whitehouse from Frederick, Maryland wants to know why you and the Orioles don't go out and get more "team speed."

EARL WEAVER: "Team speed," for chrissakes! You get ####### goddamn little FLEAS on the ####### bases gettin' picked off, trying to steal getting thrown out, taking runs away from you. You get them big cocksuckers that can hit the ####### ball outta the ballpark and you can't make any ####### mistakes.

TOM MARR: Uh, well, certainly this show's gonna go down in history, Earl.

For Earl's sake I hope Ron Luciano isn't guarding the pearly gates today.

Great manager and for all his on field histrionics I don't remember hearing anything particularly negative about him off the field. "If you play for one run you only get one run" and "pitching, defense and the three run homer" were true then, they are true today and they will be true in 50 years.

Esoteric: That line should have been engraved on Weaver's Hall of Fame plaque. Hell, it should be engraved on his tombstone. It encapsulates the man perfectly.

What terrible news, even though if Weaver made it to 82 with his body and his habits, he sure as hell got his money's worth. I was at both of his "last games", and the first of those was one I'll never forget. In what had amounted to a one game playoff for the ALE on the final day of the regular season, the Orioles got blown out by 10 to 2, and yet after the game the entire stadium remained for about 15 minutes just cheering Earl for what he'd done and who he was. It was one of the many reasons I've always thought that Memorial Stadium in the Weaver / Wild Bill Hagy era was the best baseball palace I've ever been in.

I can't wait to hear what Jim Palmer says.

"The only thing Earl (Weaver) knows about big-league pitching is that he couldn't hit it." - Jim Palmer

Esoteric: That line should have been engraved on Weaver's Hall of Fame plaque. Hell, it should be engraved on his tombstone. It encapsulates the man perfectly.

Earl joked years back that his tombstone should read "Here lies the sorest loser that ever lived." Or maybe he wasn't joking.

I'm too young to remember Earl in his heyday, but i know that he's a one-of-a-kind character, and he defines the Baltimore Orioles just as much as Cal or Brooks or Eddie or Frank or Jim.

I did have pretty good seats for Cal's 2131 game, and Earl was seated a bunch of rows ahead of me. In the middle of Cal's victory lap, I spotted him walking slowly up the stairs, wiping away tears.

He had a lot of bark, but he was a softie at heart.

The title of his autobiography, and one of my favorite quotes:

"Its What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts"

Rather surprised after his abortive comeback that he never got another big-league job.

Never wanted another one, iirc.

My first thought upon hearing the news was, what the hell was Earl doing on a boat?

A favorite Earl quote, pinpointing exactly the nature of the past-time: "This ain't football. We do this every day."

RIP, Earl. I'm sure that you didn't go without arguing with the Grim Reaper for a few minutes first.

Losing Prop Joe and Earl Weaver within 24 hours.

Oh, no. What an incredible manager, and I also loved his books and of course the Earl Weaver Baseball video game!

"Swing away, I love the hitters who can wait for strikes."

Rather surprised after his abortive comeback that he never got another big-league job.

I was always surprised that he was as young as he was. When he retired the second time (and for good), it was 18 years after he'd started managing the O's, and he'd managed for years in the minors before that. Add in to that the fact that to the 14 year old I was in 1986 he looked ancient and I knew that he'd been the manager of the Orioles for their 69-71 run before I was born, I always assumed that he was about 10 years older than he actually was... at least until I was older and actually checked for some reason.

Who deserves the credit for the "Oriole" way and the system that produced all the great gloves? Between the development system and Weaver, that was quite an organization.

BTW, I had never heard of the First Year Player Draft before. Very interesting...I came across that link while trying to figure out how Paul Blair ended up on the Orioles after playing his 1st year in the minors for the Mets.

Earl was the manager of my first favorite team. I was spoiled. May he rest in peace.

Who deserves the credit for the "Oriole" way and the system that produced all the great gloves?

Many (most) people would say Paul Richards

Between the minors and majors, Weaver had winning records in 25 consecutive managerial seasons. The only season he had a losing record in the majors was his last.

Wasn't Earl the one manager who figured out Steve Dalkowski?

Well, looking at the numbers, Earl only sorta fixed Dalkowski. A career-best K/BB ratio of 1.68, yes he still walked 6.4 per 9. However, dig the TWO homers in 160 IP.

As a Tiger fan who came of age in the 60's Earl was my least favorite manager but always a respected adversary. He always seemed to come up with the extra pitchers, the D (Belanger, Blair and Brooks at the same time, Grich later on, etc, etc) and he always found the role players who just killed Detroit (Crowley, Lowenstein, Elrod Hendricks, etc). The Tigers could have been the AL (East) powerhouse from about 1965-1975 but Baltimore took it away from them with better pitching, D, and management. Earl absolutely rode the other team's pitchers mercilessly from the 1st inning on: "quit ####### off, get that #### over, you suck, #### you and your momma," etc. And of course the umps hated him. He wore the extra long-billed hat and was so short he would get in their face and would get real close to pecking them with the hat. He kicked the dirt, threw them out of the game, used the King's English in ways never heard before, baited them to no end, and could get thrown out of two or three games in a row. He was also a stats guy before the stats revolution, eschewing the bunt and small ball for 3 run homers. "I never told Lee May to hit behind the runner." And he was good at platooning and understood that a cheap Roenicke/Lowenstein platoon in RF might be as productive as Reggie Jackson if he optimized their PAs. Having a handful of Hall of Famers for core members of his teams sure didn't hurt, and he clearly took over a very good team in 1969, but he was a great manager, perhaps the best our era. Having watched his entire career, I would rank him ahead of the other modern big names: LaRussa, Lasorda, Sparky, Cox, Torre, etc. RIP Earl.

Weaver was pretty humble as far as the role of the manager. As he once said, “A manager’s job is simple. For 162 games, you try not to screw up all that smart stuff your organization did last December.”

I'll always remember one moment with Weaver. It was Game Seven of the 1971 World Series, with the Orioles facing a red hot Steve Blass. In the very first inning, Weaver stormed out of the Orioles’ dugout to stage several protests with home plate umpire Nestor Chylak. Weaver had several objections: Blass was illegally putting his hands to his mouth, wasn’t coming to a complete stop with a runner on base, and wasn’t keeping his right foot in contact with the pitching rubber. The latter infraction grated Weaver the most. “Rule 8:01(b) says you have to be in front of the rubber or on it,” Weaver said adamantly.

It was all part of an effort to rattle Blass, to throw him off his game while he was in the midst of a pitching hot streak. It didn't work--Blass pitched great that day--but it was pure Weaver, trying to get any advantage he could find.

RIP ya feisty curmudgeon. No idea whether he's heading to heaven or hell, but one of those places is about to experience more colorful language.

18 years and only one losing season and yet still the guys who bunt and waste outs playing for one run get called geniuses by half-wit experts.

The Tigers could have been the AL (East) powerhouse from about 1965-1975 but Baltimore took it away from them with better pitching, D, and management.

That was a good post, but your memory glasses are clouded with Tiger stripes.

Between 1965 and 1975, the Tigers finished a net total of 140 games behind the leaders in the AL (1965-68) or the ALE (1969-75). Aside from their one year of glory and their one division title, they never finished fewer than 10 games behind the leader in any other year besides 1967, when the Orioles were a distant sixth. They also finished second only twice, which means that it wasn't just Weaver and the Orioles who were keeping them down. And in 1974 and 1975 they finished last, by 19 and 37 1//2 games.

Wasn't Earl the one manager who figured out Steve Dalkowski?

The story that I read was that Weaver was a big fan of giving his players psychological tests to measure (among other things) their capacity to learn. Apparently Dalkowski's tests showed that he was (to put it charitably) not the brightest guy around. Weaver realized that Dalkowski was not able to absorb complex instruction and told him to just throw the ball over the middle of the plate. Dalkowski had his best year ever pitching for Weaver at Elmira in 1962. The next season he was invited to spring training with the Orioles and hurt his arm while pitching. Dalkowski was never the same again and his career ended a few years later.

EDIT: Carbonated beverage of choice to Gold Star. And also, RIP Earl Weaver

Never saw him man-

Well, actually,yeah, I did. Those early '70s Orioles teams (which I was of course predisposed to like because Brooks Robinson came from Arkansas) were a blast to watch.

RIP.

Pie chart of Earl's ejections.

earl's other football quote was, 'the other team gets as many chances as you do. you can't run out the clock because there isn't a d8mn clock'.

Loved watching Earl Weaver manage. Thought he might be nearing the end when he auctioned off his memorabilia a while back. Glad he was in good enough shape to be on a cruise and then suddenly die. There are worse ways to go.

I really love the "Arguing during Lineup Exchange" part of the pie chart. He got thrown out 94 times, right? Which means he got thrown out twice before the game even started. Impressive.

The 1969-71 Orioles always struck me as good comps for the 1988-90 A's.

From Derrick Goold: "Stan "The Man" Musial died today in St. Louis at 5:45 p.m. local time. He was surrounded by family."

The first time two baseball Hall of Famers died on the same day, I presume?

Evidently so.

The first time two baseball Hall of Famers died on the same day, I presume?

Earl and Stan are the John Adams and Thomas Jefferson of baseball.

I recognize his place in treasured baseball lore and American experience; but I must admit I personally never found Weaver's screaming shtick entertaining when employed so frequently.

Earl and Stan are the John Adams and Thomas Jefferson of baseball.

But instead of being on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it's the 50th anniversary of Gates Brown's first major-league homer.

Pie chart of Earl's ejections.

Shredding the rule book?! I would have paid to see that one. RIP.

Shredding the rule book?! I would have paid to see that one. RIP.

Wasn't just any rulebook, either -- it was Ray Miller's copy, which he had memorized at Weaver's insistence so Miller could provide instant analyses and applications of esoteric rules. Only problem is that it was also full of Miller's copious handwritten notes about all the rules and their various potential interpretations, which Weaver didn't know when he ripped it to shreds in front of the ump. So when you see pictures of the incident, take notice of the fact that you can see Miller on his hands and knees behind Weaver and the umpire, frantically trying to pick up all the shredded pieces so he can salvage at least some of years' worth of work.