‘The Last Manager’ Review: An Edge on the Diamond

Within the spring of 1952, a baby-faced 21-year-old prospect named Earl Weaver arrived at coaching camp for the St. Louis Cardinals in St. Petersburg, Fla. A line-drive hitter who introduced crowds to their ft along with his livid vitality, Weaver had excelled within the minor leagues for 4 seasons and was now keen to affix the majors.

His destiny, nonetheless, could be decided by the brand new Cardinals supervisor, Eddie Stanky, who, on the tail finish of his taking part in profession, had the choice of assuming the twin function of player-manager. Stanky needed to determine if the final infield spot would go to Weaver or himself. He selected himself. Weaver, embittered and demoralized, was despatched again to the bushes and would by no means return as a participant.

That painful rejection is the start line for John W. Miller’s vivid portrait of one in all baseball’s most colourful figures. In “The Final Supervisor: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball,” Mr. Miller makes the case that Weaver was each a baseball innovator and a bygone archetype: His domineering management fashion has lengthy since fallen out of favor. Caring “virtually violently” about each pitch, Weaver battled his personal gamers, exploited each edge and overcame his personal demons to turn into the stemwinding maestro of profitable baseball.

Mr. Miller was a reporter for this newspaper when, in 2013, an editor requested him to put in writing an obituary of Weaver, who had died at age 82. That project led to this ebook, which captures baseball’s working-class roots. Weaver, born in 1930, was the product of a gritty St. Louis neighborhood and a part of a household that drank, gambled and scraped by in the course of the Nice Despair. He was near his Uncle Bud, a bookie who taught him how one can dissect baseball video games for revenue and instilled in him a combative disrespect for authority. His father, Earl Sr., ran a dry-cleaning enterprise that washed the baseball uniforms of the Cardinals and the Browns, giving the boy entry to the tobacco-stained sanctum of Sportsman’s Park. He was hooked.