Resident Book Review of “The Manager: How Earl Weaver…”

Resident Paul Rao will review The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented and Reinvented Baseball [New York: Avid Reader, 2025] by John W. Miller on Tuesday, July 15, 2025 at 7 PM in the Auditorium. This is his review for the July issue of The Sunburst.

In The Last Manager, author John Miller deftly captures the colorful era of Orioles legend Earl Weaver. A treasury of baseball locker-room secrets, stories, and strategies, it’s the ultimate insiders’ guide to the on-field miracles, ejections, and bloopers of the Weaver years, packed with lively Weaverisms.

Earl dreamed of “the bigs” as a kid in St. Louis, with his uncle and namesake serving as the street coach who opened up the world of baseball to his eager nephew. We then follow Earl’s stressful and ultimately unsuccessful stint as a young player striving to make it out of the minors and into “the Dance.” Ready to return home in frustration after failing to make it into

the bigs, Earl got an unexpected shot at coaching, and then managing−first in the minors and then in the majors, where he finally realized his big dream here in Charm City. And the rest, as they say, is history.

In this rollicking read, John Miller gives us the man in full. In a typical exchange, Weaver yells at an offending umpire, “Are you going to get any better, or is this it?” Baseball doesn’t get much more real than this. The review will include video vignettes of Orioles Magic, Weaver ejections, and a touching Hall of Fame speech. Fans will love this storehouse of sports history.

Resident Paul Rao PhD, a retired healthcare executive, was Chief Operating Officer at MedStar National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington, DC. This is his fourth Book Review.