"TEAM SPEED? GET SOME
BIG#$@&*%$*! WHO CAN HIT THE #$@&*%!$* BALL OUT OF THE PARK!"On a Saturday afternoon in mid-March, the most irascible manager in the history of the
Baltimore Orioles is watching an Orioles pitcher get pasted, one hitter after
another. This is only a spring training game at quaint Fort Lauderdale Stadium,
not something that counted back at Baltimore's old Memorial Stadium, on 33rd
Street. But Earl Weaver, cap pulled low, that leprechaun's twinkle in his eyes
gone dark, does not like what he sees. All of his great teams—and they were all
pretty great—were built on a foundation of reliable pitching. ¶ He won the
pennant one year by making only 167 pitching changes in 159 games. Another year
he won a championship by using 12 pitchers—not just in the World Series but the
whole season.Whack!"Mix in a wild pitch or
something!" the old manager blurts out.Whack!"Oh, my God!"
Weaver croaks. Another shot, some 400 feet of solid contact, disappears out of
sight, foul.Whack!"Who the hell is pitching?"It does not diminish Weaver's
agitation that this is a spring training game. His reason for being is pretty
simple. If somebody is keeping score—be it in the Grapefruit League, in the
World Series or in Ping-Pong games against blue-haired ladies on a cruise ship—Earl
Sidney Weaver desperately wants to have more of whatever is being counted than
you have. What drove him absolutely crazy as a manager, or absolutely
[bleeping] crazy in the Weaver patois, were all the messy obstacles to his
simple desire to win. What stood maddeningly in his way, besides the guys on
the other side of the field, were ballplayers of his who made outs on the base
paths, umpires, people who thought the hit-and-run play was good baseball,
sacrifice bunts, umpires, the five-man rotation, that smart-aleck Palmer,
umpires, pitchers who didn't throw strikes, fans who wanted the Orioles to run
more and, well ... those bleeping umpires.Weaver:You're here for one
[bleeping] specific reason.Umpire Bill
Haller:What's that, Earl?Weaver:To [bleep] us good.That exchange took place
after a grand total of five pitches had been thrown in a 1980 game.Whack!Weaver is told that the
Orioles pitcher getting whacked is Adam Eaton, whom Baltimore recycled after
the Phillies preferred to pay him nearly nine million not to pitch for
them. Weaver is 78 years old and has not managed a game in 23 years, not
officially, anyway. He spends his time cooking, visiting the horse track,
watching baseball on TV and playing gin rummy with buddies at his country club
in Miami, sometimes after a round of golf, though not as often now that needing
driver-three-wood-eight-iron to reach a par-4 has sapped much of the fun from
his game."I'll tell you one
thing: He throws strikes," Weaver says of Eaton. "That's something
today, to tell you the truth."Baseball today is a scientific game, far less mysterious than it was 30 years
ago. It has been measured, mapped and cataloged like the human genome. Why
bunt, we know now, when the run expectancy is 27.123% greater with a man on
first base and no outs than a man on second base with one out? But what we know
today, Earl Weaver understood back in his time without sabermetrics and
computer spreadsheets.On May 23, 1979, Weaver sent
Pat Kelly to pinch-hit for Rick Dempsey against Boston pitcher Bob Stanley with
two on and one out in the bottom of the 10th inning of a 2--2 ball game. Weaver
knew that Dempsey was 0 for 6 lifetime against Stanley and that Kelly was 2 for
6. Kelly hit a walk-off home run. It was after that game that Weaver delivered
to the gentlemen of the press the summary that would do well as the epitaph for
his managerial career, if not his gravestone: "Pitching, defense and the
three-run homer." (Actually, Weaver said in 1986, "On my tombstone
just write, THE SOREST LOSER THAT EVER LIVED.")Weaver is the grandfather of
the modern game. He understood better than anyone in his time the preciousness
of the 27 outs (often regarding the sacrifice bunt as a waste of one), the
folly of the hit-and-run, the value and symbiosis of pitching and defense, and
the importance of batter-pitcher matchups, statistical analysis and on-base
percentage. Weaver was the Copernicus of baseball. Just as Copernicus
understood heliocentric cosmology a full century before the invention of the
telescope, Weaver understood smart baseball a generation before it was
empirically demonstrated."I made no bones about it when
I first got the job: I always wanted the next Earl Weaver as manager,"
says Oakland general manager Billy Beane, whose statistically oriented approach
to the game, as chronicled in the 2003 best seller Moneyball, was
considered cutting edge. "Earl was ahead of his time. He understood
offensive baseball, pitching rotations, the efficiency of three-run homers
versus a single and a sac bunt. His personality was something people recognized
him for: the run-ins with umpires and Jim Palmer. But if you get to the core of
what he accomplished, he was the template of the way I'd like to run a team.
Consciously or not, he understood mathematics and probability."