Author Talks: Leadership lessons from a baseball icon

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Seth Stevenson chats with journalist John W. Miller about his new book, The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, March 2025). Miller’s biography details Weaver’s rise to baseball glory and the unique leadership approaches that helped him steer the Baltimore Orioles to an American Major League Baseball World Series championship. Weaver was ahead of his time in many ways, valuing data-powered analytics and cutting-edge strategies during an era when the game was rife with hidebound conservatism.

An edited version of the conversation follows. You can watch the full video at the end of this page.

What made you want to write a book about Earl Weaver?

I wrote this book because I grew up a big baseball fan and played baseball in college. I was also a reporter at The Wall Street Journal when Earl Weaver died. I was asked to write his obituary because I was one of the “baseball guys.”

In writing his obituary, I thought, “Here’s somebody who was incredibly famous in the 1970s and 1980s.” For our listeners who are perhaps not big baseball fans, he was one of the most famous people in the game of baseball for 15 years as a manager.

These days, managers are not as powerful and important within the game of baseball. Earl Weaver is in Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball. He’s in all the treatments of baseball history as the pioneer of analytics, as somebody who revolutionized baseball. He transformed it and was the most entertaining character in the game for a long time.

As I was writing his obituary, I thought, “Nobody’s done this book. Nobody’s examined his legacy at a time when baseball, like the rest of culture, has changed.” Baseball has become more automated in its use of analysis and analytics. Bosses and hierarchies are not what they used to be; there’s more of a collaborative model.

Managers in Earl Weaver’s day were the absolute bosses and ran teams in a way that made owners think that hiring one of these guys—the right person—could get you a World Series championship. So I became fascinated with his story and with the story of the manager as a bigger piece of not just baseball but also Americana.

What makes Earl Weaver an intriguing figure?

He was incredibly entertaining, incredibly funny. Writer and podcaster Bill Burr likened Weaver’s arguments with umpires to Hulk Hogan whipping up a crowd. People would buy a ticket to a baseball game to see him perform. He was possibly the most famous “umpire baiter” in the history of baseball—and perhaps in the history of sports.

If Weaver wasn’t happy, he would kick dirt, turn his hat around, or sit on home plate and steal one of the bases. Umpires would bait him, too. He was a chain-smoker who kept a pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket. Umpires would punch him or push him in the place in his breast pocket where the cigarettes were, hoping to crush them.

Weaver was part of American culture. One of the examples I give in the book occurred in 1983. Weaver was one of the 12 interview-of-the-month subjects in Playboy magazine, at a time when that was a cultural signifier. Other subjects that year included Ted Turner, Yasser Arafat, Ansel Adams, and Stephen King. That was how famous Earl Weaver was—on the level of Ted Turner and Stephen King.

He was also incredibly successful. During Weaver’s tenure, the Orioles won an average of 95 games a year. They went to the US World Series four times, and they won more games—over 100 more—than the second-best team.

People who aren’t baseball fans or people who study leadership might think, “You know, he’s a screamer, he’s a shouter, he’s a hustler. So why was he so successful?” What made him such a great leader of people even though he was also, in a way, rough around the edges and a caricature of the archetypical screaming manager?

Why is Earl Weaver the ‘last manager’?

The moniker is an exaggeration because there are managers today. Yet he symbolizes the last manager of his kind who ran teams almost by themselves.

One person I interviewed for the book told me, “The biggest change in baseball, and the logistics of baseball, is the size of the traveling party: Teams will travel with 70, 75 people. And these include a dozen coaches, trainers, psychologists, analysts, video people, all of whom are collaborating on this effort to help their team—the 25 baseball players—win games.”

Well, back in Earl Weaver’s day, the travel count was 30: perhaps 25 players and a coaching staff of five or six, maybe a traveling secretary, and that was it. Those managers basically decided everything, and they managed by intuition, by gut.

Teams thought that if you selected the right person to manage, that was the secret sauce. Since there was so much less analysis of how baseball games were won and lost at that time, if a manager evaluated things correctly, it could make a big difference.

Earl Weaver strategically figured out things on his own decades before analysts and the people whom Michael Lewis describes in Moneyball came on the scene. That’s what makes him such an interesting subject to study. He came to these conclusions on his own, in a way that predicted the modern age, not just of baseball, but of business and American culture as well.

Are there lessons that CEOs could learn about management from Earl Weaver?

Absolutely. Earl Weaver’s character is so extreme that it highlights the qualities of leadership for two reasons. First, he was a great leader; empirically, you can see that in the game results. Second, he had challenges. He had a drinking problem. Sometimes players didn’t respect him, and they would haze him.

One may think, “How can these things be true? How could he be a sort of ridiculous character but then also a great leader of men.” The answer is that he cared about the things that mattered and not about the things that didn’t: It was that simple.

He did not hold grudges and didn’t fuss about things that weren’t important. He understood the mechanics of baseball better than anybody. The mechanics were to play fundamentally sound defense, throw strikes, and have an efficient offense founded on getting on base and driving people in, not on trying to bunt or to steal bases. These facts have been proved empirically correct by later analysts, by the people, and, again, by Billy Beane and the Moneyball crowd.

By focusing on what really mattered, Earl Weaver provides an incredible example of what leadership is: Leadership is pointing at not just results but also the process of what matters. If you’re in business, it’s profit; it’s sustainability. In baseball, it’s winning games, but it’s also a culture that leads to winning and is not obsessed with the immediate result.

Earl Weaver’s teams always had a slow start. Yet since they were so fundamentally sound, over time, they had the best record in the second half. They always accumulated good habits and didn’t always care who got the credit.

Another important lesson that today’s business leaders can learn from Weaver is about having a great eye for talent. Once he selected people, he was harder on the players doing well. He thought that if you were doing well, he could squeeze extra performance out of you. He imagined that the guy who was slumping was one who probably couldn’t be helped, because that person was probably doing the best they could.

Jim Palmer is the best example: He was a US Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher, and Weaver thought, “If I keep pushing him, he’s got more in him; he’s talented.” Conversely, Weaver would leave the guy who was slumping alone, and if he didn’t rebound, he would let him go. I like that counterintuitive thinking that you have to find people who have something more to give and push them, as opposed to trying to make something out of someone who doesn’t have that capacity.

Did Earl Weaver have a ‘growth mindset’?

In my research, and in reading about Earl Weaver and talking to people who knew him, I never heard the term “growth mindset.” Yet after I wrote the book and included some of its precepts, I started sending the book to people who worked in Major League Baseball, thinking, “Oh, we talk about growth mindset all the time.”

Major League Baseball very much follows the fads of modern business culture. The term growth mindset is used a lot. Earl Weaver had that in droves, and that’s what made him so special.

He was never afraid to question himself. He wrote three books with a ghostwriter’s help. One of them is titled It’s What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts. He hung that in the clubhouse.

He was relentlessly open to new ideas, partly because of his own insecurities. He played for 20 years in the US Minor Leagues. He always felt like a bush leaguer, partly because he was smart and knew that new ideas were how one advanced.

I hope my book will bring back to light some incredible examples in baseball history that have been forgotten. One example is that Weaver was the first manager to use a radar gun. At the time, baseball was very suspicious of technology. Yet a college baseball coach named Danny Litwhiler borrowed a radar gun from a friend who was a policeman.

He parked the car behind the mound at Michigan State and used the police radar gun to clock speed. He developed the prototype and offered to send it to Major League Baseball. Earl Weaver was the first Major League Baseball manager who said, “Yeah, I want to try that out. I want to use that.” Immediately, he zeroed in on how to use it: not just for pitching velocity but also for outfield arms.

Weaver was relentlessly creative. He would do things that no one had ever thought of, such as bat a pinch [a pinch hitter leadoff] on the road and play him at shortstop—and then place his regular shortstop in the bottom of the first inning. His thinking was that a pinch hitter is worth just as much in the first inning as in the ninth inning, so why not use him if you have that player who’s an extra bat? Why not use him to start the game?

On the road, he would put a pitcher on his off day in the designated hitter [DH] position and then just choose the DH he wanted when that spot came up in the order. Major League Baseball made a rule against that.

It is inspiring that someone who experienced that much success never sat on his laurels and was relentless in trying to find the edge wherever he could.

Were Earl Weaver’s arguments with umpires a sideshow or part of his leadership?

It’s a component of what made him a celebrated, fun, and popular manager. I don’t know if he would have been as successful without the arguments. It was part of his emotional makeup. He was an undersized Minor League player who, as I show in the book, was actually a pretty good prospect early on, yet he was cheated out of a second base job.

That led him to have a chip on his shoulder that was inseparable from his drive to win and from his drive to compete and prove himself. It all went together. Without the fire, you wouldn’t have had the insane fights with umpires. But you also might not have had that competitiveness that makes him so interesting, attractive, successful, and fun.

His story matters because he was a winner, and we wouldn’t really care about him if he hadn’t been such an incredible winner. He was a winner because he really cared. Caring is another part of leadership. Part of that caring was losing it when a call didn’t go his way.

He was slightly manipulative, in that he knew what he was doing. He would sometimes turn to a bench coach and say, “Watch this,” and then go out and make the stadium go crazy. It was a way of rallying his troops. It was a way of deflecting criticism from his players, if the team was slumping. It was also a way of showing that he cared about the games.

Mike Flanagan, the Orioles pitcher, said, “He made you feel like this was so important—that caring about playing and winning was so important.” And I don’t know if he could have communicated that importance, the gravity of the moment, as well if he hadn’t been willing to go out and lose it with umpires.

Would you want Earl Weaver to lead a company you invested in?

Not today. The risks would be too much to overcome, but that was a different day. What I love about Earl Weaver is that there’s this raw intelligence: I call it “Shakespearean.” It’s a very human, profound perceptiveness that I love. He was much smarter and deeper than anybody gave him credit for.

He never went to college and was raised by his uncle, who was a bookie in St. Louis, Missouri. Weaver learned a street hustler’s culture of always trying to find an edge, of always looking for a new angle to get ahead. I would want him in my company, but I’m not sure if today I’d want him to be the boss.

But a team that has Earl Weaver on it—especially a 1970s peak-hustling, strategizing Earl Weaver—is an organization that would be greatly enhanced by somebody who cared that much, was that smart, who had that level of perceptiveness, and the love of the fight, whatever the challenge, whether it’s a business or a baseball team.

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