Sport: Baltimore’s Soft-Shelled Crab

Baseball’s top manager has his Orioles beating the best

Earl Weaver looked on first in anguish, then in outrage. The relief pitcher he had brought in to protect a two-run lead over the Oakland A’s last week hit one batter and sent another sprawling to the ground to avoid a beaning. Bad enough, but then Home Plate Umpire Rich Garcia claimed that the pitcher had nicked the third hitter on the hand. In a flash of anger, the manager of the Baltimore Orioles came bellowing out of the dugout. “I heard wood!”

he screamed at Garcia, claiming the pitch had actually hit the bat.

Hands on hips, his entire body bobbing with fury, Weaver closed on his quarry and pressed his argument to within an inch of Garcia’s nose.

“You’re a dog,” he informed the ump “You’re outta here!” replied Garcia.

But Weaver did not go gently into the good night. He seldom does when he is tossed out of a game. He strut ted back to the dugout, only to find a cause for another epic tirade. Baltimore Pitcher Sammy Stewart had started to throw to Catcher Rick Dempsey, hoping to keep his arm warm until tempers cooled.

The ump on second base told Stewart to desist. Heave ho or no, Weaver came boiling back onto the field. “There’s nothing in the rule-books that can stop my pitcher from throwing to remain warm,” he sputtered. “This has never been done be fore in the history of baseball!” The umpires quickly formed a human barricade around Weaver, and after a bit of belly bumping, the manager departed for the second time.

As Oakland fans— and two of the umpires-applauded. Weaver finally left the field. At least, so it seemed.

Back home in Baltimore, Weaver’s clubhouse office is equipped with closed-circuit television and a telephone line to the dugout that allow him to keep on running the team in just such emergencies Lacking these sophisticated amenities in Oakland, Weaver was reduced to hiding in the dugout toilet to remain close to the action. As he poked his head out between plays, Oakland Manager Jim Marshall spotted him and appealed to the umps.

Garcia went into action once again. He tracked down Weaver and sent him to the locker room.

“He’s a disgrace to the game,” Gar cia fumed later. Added First Base Um pire Larry Barnett: “He goes goofy. He can’t control himself, screaming, ranting and raving. Every time he comes out, he’s shot out of a cannon.” As for Weaver, he blithely, if inelegantly, explained: “I was in the bathroom throwing up. They made me sick.”

Whatever the state of Weaver’s health (umpires have given him indigestion 70 times in nearly eleven years as a big league manager, a record for banishments among current managers), the condition f his Baltimore Orioles was hearty. With the 26 major league teams preparing to break for this week’s mid-season Ail-Star Game, the Orioles last week owned the best record in either league (57 wins and 31 losses for a .648 winning percentage) and this in a baseball year as exciting as any in recent memory. There were fascinating races in each division of both leagues, and none of last year’s division champs was in first place. In the National League West, the Houston Astros finally were fulfilling their promise, leading the Cincinnati Reds, while the Los Angeles Dodgers, 1978’s pennant winner slumped to last. The Montreal Expos, of all people, were trailed by the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies, winners of the National League East for the past three years. Kansas City, usually ruler of the American League West, was floundering in fourth, while the greatly improved Texas Rangers and California Angels fought for the lead.

The Baltimore Orioles were playing in the toughest territory in the sport, the -.

American League’s Eastern Division Pit ted against the defending World Cham pion New York Yankees and the pow erful Boston Red Sox, teams of great talent, rich payrolls and huge egos, Baltimore wins without benefit of free agents fat salaries or superstars. Their top hitter, Outfielder Ken Singleton, was batting only .294, and American League fans neglected to elect a single Oriole to the Ail-Star team. Nonetheless, Baltimore wins baseball games with a masterly blend of young, home-grown talent and unassuming veterans playing solid, back-to-basics baseball. And they win with the benefit of Earl S. Weaver, by consensus, the best manager in baseball.

Since taking over the Orioles from Hank Bauer in the mid dle of the 1968 season, Weaver has a winning percentage of .596, an average that places him second among the alltime best major league managers. He is in the august com pany of Joe McCarthy (.615), man ager of the Ruth/Gehrig/Dickey/ DiMaggio Yankees, and Billy Southworth (.593), whose St. Louis Cardinals dominated the National League during World War II. For all their glory, John P. McGraw (.587), Connie Mack (.484) and Casey Stengel (.509) did not win as consistently. In the past eleven years, Weaver’s Ori oles have finished either first or sec ond in their division nine times, won five Eastern Division titles, three pennants and the World Series in 1970.

Though no team in the majors has come close to Baltimore’s remarkable record over the past two wins, 1,408 losses), Orioles struggle in relative anonymity alongside their more glamorous colleagues on the Eastern seaboard. The Birds play to yawning rows of empty seats. The record season attendance, set in 1966, is 1.2 million; by the end of June, the Red Sox had already drawn 1.1 million this year. The Orioles’ owner, Baltimore Beer Tycoon Jerold C. Hoffberger has had the team on the market for five years, and buyers bursting with plans to move the franchise to nearby Washington or faraway Moosejaw are forever sniffing around the front office.

Just why the Orioles have never really excited Baltimore remains something of a mystery. Other blue-collar cities, such as Detroit and Pittsburgh, have supported baseball teams over the years. And the sports fans are certainly there: the pro Baltimore Colts are heroes. One reason why the Orioles do not draw better during the long, hot summer may be that the beaches and boats of Chesapeake Bay are just a short drive away. Another could be Memorial Stadium itself. The parking is limited, and any game that draws over 10,000 is sure to cause a traffic jam. For years fans have protested about having to wait in long lines for beer and bathrooms.

But this year, finally, there are signs of fresh support. Home attendance is averaging 20,531, compared with 14,407 last season, and there are some young faces in the generally middle-aged crowd. Occasionally, people having a backyard beer bust will even break out in a cheer, college-style: “O-R-I-O-L-E-S!”

There would be much more to cheer about in Baltimore this year had not the free-agent era dawned in 1976. Other teams stripped the financially strapped Orioles (operating losses last year: $232,141) of a gallery of stars. Reggie Jackson went to the Yankees for around $2.9 million. Second Baseman Bobby Grich got an estimated $1.75 million from the California Angels. Slugger Don Baylor went there too. Pitchers were hired away, Ross Grimsley by the Expos, Wayne Garland by Cleveland and Dick Drago by the Red Sox. “Yes,” admits Orioles General Manager Hank Peters, “that’s a good All-Star team. Believe me, it hurts, it hurts.”

Yet nothing truly seems to hurt Baltimore. With a development program that has become a model for the rest of the major leagues, the club constantly replenishes its supply of first-class ballplayers. Says Cleveland Indians General Manager Gabe Paul: “Baltimore has made a tradition of having great scouts. They seem to have better eyes and better judgment ” Fifteen of the 25 players on the current Oriole roster were brought up through the farm system, and with plenty of talent on the big club, Baltimore has the luxury of seasoning their young players before pushing them into the lineup. Example: Shortstop Luis Aparicio shared a season with Newcomer Mark Belanger in the late ’60s while he developed the skills that have made him the American League’s Gold Glove Winner eight times. Now Belanger, 35, is bringing along his understudy, Kiko Garcia, 25.

Thus the Orioles have maintained a remarkable continuity over the years blending age and youth. Oriole Coach Frank Robinson, a Triple Crown winner with the great clubs of the late ’60s, which included Brooks Robinson and Boog Powell, explains: “A lot of clubs sit down at the end of spring training, pick the 25 best athletes and head north.

Here, they sit down and look for the right mix, and they do it in detail like no other ball club I’ve ever seen It’s not just the best athletes or the best starting nine, it’s who can do the best job of sitting on the bench for a week, then get up and get a hit? Who can steal a base as a pinch runner in the late innings? Who can play more than one position if someone gets injured? Nobody in baseball can put all those elements together better than Earl Weaver, because nobody can judge baseball talent as well as he can.”

As he keeps his Orioles flying high, i despite injuries and the power Lof the Yankees and the Red Sox, Weaver has grown in stature in the eyes of his peers. “He gets the most out of every individual,” says George Bamberger, who used to coach Baltimore’s pitchers and now manages the Milwaukee Brewers, another strong team in the division.

“He’s great when times are bad. He doesn’t panic when his team goes into a slump.” Says John Schuerholz, vice president of the Kansas City Royals: “In years past I considered Weaver among the best managers in baseball. Now I think he is the best of them all. I hesitate to say that he’s mellowed, really, because he’s as fiery a competitor as ever. But he’s matured as an individual, and he’s gotten to know so much about the game. Those tremendously aggressive instincts are now tempered with a tremendous amount of knowledge.”

Earl Weaver, at 5 ft. 8 in. and 165 Ibs., a bundle of energy but not of modesty, admits that no one can evaluate players as well as he. “But I learned to judge a ballplayer’s capabilities the hard way by having to recognize my own incapabilities.” Weaver, 48, grew up in St Louis in the days of the Cardinals’ Gas

House Gang and the old Browns of the American League. (In 1954 the Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles.) Both the Cards and the Browns won pennants in 1944, and Weaver had the treat of a home-town World Series.

He was an old fan by then. His father ran the dry-cleaning establishment that cleaned uniforms for both clubs. At age seven, Earl went into the locker rooms to pick up the laundry. “I used to walk into that clubhouse and carry a big armful of dirty uniforms out to my dad’s van. You don’t think my eyes were big? Those were the uniforms Leo Durocher, Ducky Medwick, Pepper Martin wore, and I was carrying them in my arms. By the time I was eleven or twelve, I was seeing 100 baseball games a year, sitting in the stands second-guessing Billy Southworth. I guess you could say that baseball got into my blood.”

When he graduated from high school at 17, he signed with the Cardinals as a second baseman.

There followed nine years as a player in the minors: tank towns, bus rides, bad food, but he was young and playing ball and that was all that mattered. Red Schoendienst was the resident second baseman for the Cards in those days, and no minor leaguer was about to dislodge him. The closest Weaver came was a single spring training on the big league roster before being sent down again to Class AA. “My biggest thrill was when I got into a game and somebody popped the ball up behind second base. I went back for it, and all of a sudden, I heard Enos Slaughter call me off the ball. I got out of the way and let him catch it. It was thrill enough just to be called off by a guy like that.”

He worked off-seasons at a variety of menial jobs, finally settling in at a loan company, where he interviewed applicants and tracked down delinquent borrowers. Ballplayers with lame excuses have since found that a manager who once chased defaulters views their alibis with a gimlet eye. In 1956 Weaver was hired as player-manager of the Class A Knoxville Smokies, a move that penurious owners traditionally employ to get two jobs done on one salary. The new manager promptly showed insight by benching Knoxville’s second baseman, one Earl Weaver. When the year ended, he gave up on baseball and headed for a career in small loans. “The only thing I’d ever wanted in my life was to be a major league ballplayer, but I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t good enough. It broke my heart. But right then I started becoming a good baseball person, because when I came to recognize, and more important, accept my own deficiencies, then I could recognize other players’ inabilities and learn to accept them, not for what they can’t do, but for what they can do. And in the process, I suppose, I broke some hearts.”

But the Baltimore front office had spotted Weaver’s managing talent during his brief tenure in Knoxville. He was offered a job as player-manager of the Class D farm team, and was on his way. Milwaukee Brewer General Manager Harry Dalton, a former Baltimore executive who shepherded Weaver’s rise through the minors, had no doubts about picking him to manage the Orioles: “He’s always been a winner, and it’s as simple as that. In baseball language, that denotes a particular type—a man who gets the most out of his ball clubs.”

Some American League umpires may find it hard to believe, but Weaver was much more tempestuous in the minors than he is today. Blessed, or perhaps cursed, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the game, its rules, precedents and subtleties, he pushed his cause with a vigor that bordered on the manic. American League President Lee MacPhail recalls the day when Weaver was thrown out of a game for disputing a call at third base —and uprooted the bag and took it with him. A policeman had to be dispatched to recover the base so the game could continue. Dalton remembers that when Weaver did not like a call at home, he would insist that, since the umpires could not see the plate anyhow, it might as well be obliterated: “He would get down on all fours and make little sand castles on top of home plate and completely cover it up.”

Reflecting on Weaver, a trio of American League umpires offer differing views.

Says Ron Luciano, who has tangled spectacularly with him over the years: “He gives me the impression that he wants everything—that he wants you to cheat for him. He wants an unfair advantage. Maybe that comes with a winning attitude.”

Says Dave Phillips: “His main objective is to intimidate. He doesn’t use any curse words. He just fights for everything he can get.” Jerry Neudecker is kinder: “I’d just as soon have Weaver out there as anybody else. He’s been fair to me. He won’t take up for a ballplayer when he knows the ballplayer is wrong.”

When Weaver thinks he is right, though, he can still be a terror. In a memorable display of baseball theater, Weaver last month waxed so wroth during a fight with an umpire that he literally tore up the rulebook. Recalls Weaver: “I said, ‘If the rulebook doesn’t mean anything, then let’s just go ahead and tear it up.’ And I did. Then I saw there was a chunk I missed, so I picked it up and tore it up too.”

But Weaver does not win games fighting with umpires. He wins with his own distinctive style of managing. He does not believe inflexibly in the sacrifice bunt, the hit-and-run or, for that matter, the supposedly hallowed rule that left-handed hitters hit better against right-handed pitchers, and vice versa. He does believe-in The Stats. The Stats, those mysterious denizens of a huge, battered filing cabinet in Weaver’s Baltimore office, show every Oriole hitter’s performance—lifetime, seasonal and last week—against every American League pitcher. Boston Manager Don Zimmer will start the same man day after day. Not Weaver. He tailors his lineup to the opponent’s starting pitcher. “Now take Lee May,” Weaver explains. “Here’s the most consistent power hitter in the majors over the last decade, but he hits Luis Tiant about two for 21.

No way he’s going to be in the lineup against Tiant when I got this little guy who hits his junk for about .420.” The result is a wildly varying series of batting orders and, Weaver swears before each game, lineups certain to “hit this bum about four times out often.” In the words of Rightfielder Singleton: “We call it going to the books, as in, ‘He went to the books on you, and you get a day off.’ ” One additional advantage: no one languishes on the bench for too long.

Some players resent the constant juggling and insist that they find it difficult to settle into a groove in the field or at the plate while yo-yoing in and out of the lineup. If they don’t, Weaver has a simple solution. Says Pitcher Steve Stone: “He just tells you he’s the boss.

Most managers don’t have to tell you that all the time. It’s a classic Napoleonic complex.”

Such comments, barbed enough to provoke a fistfight with other managers, roll off Weaver. He and his players yell at each other so much that the dugout sounds like a session of primal scream therapy, but the anger quickly passes.

Frank Robinson, who became the first black to manage in the big leagues (with Cleveland) after his playing career ended, believes this is Weaver’s strong point:

“Lord, nobody can chew you like Earl can chew you, and it’s plenty tough to take. But the instant it’s over, it’s forgotten. The man never carries a grudge, and that’s where trouble can start. He does the best job of any manager I’ve ever known at keeping 25 ballplayers relatively happy. He doesn’t do it by being their friend; he does it by never, but never, taking anything personally and by making damn sure nobody else does either.”

To ensure that personal matters don’t intrude on the clubhouse, Weaver keeps a studied distance between him and his players. “I don’t hug a pitcher after a shutout, because next time, I may have to take him out of the game in the first inning. I can’t be their friend because I have to be the guy who yells at them when they make mistakes.” But Weaver is intensely loyal to his players—and they know it. Pitcher Jim Palmer, three-time Cy Young Award winner, currently out of the pitching rotation with arm trouble, is a sophisticated star who has, for 10% seasons, carried on a love-hate relationship with his manager. Their differences are legion and complex, but of one thing Palmer is certain: “He’s on my side.” When Palmer’s name is mentioned, Weaver softly claps his hands, a characteristic gesture he uses to show respect for talent. “This is a Hall of Fame pitcher,” he says of Palmer. “How can you not love that kind of ability?”

Weaver’s Orioles have always had good pitching. Over the years, the starting rotation has included such names as Mike Cuellar, Dave McNally, Pat Dobson, Palmer and, of late, such strong young stars as Dennis Martinez, Mike Flanagan, Scott McGregor and Reliever Don (“Full Pack”) Stanhouse (“That’s how many cigarettes I smoke when he’s on the mound,” Weaver explains). The Orioles have also built a defense that is as sound as talent and hard practice can make it. Baltimore teams rarely miss the cutoff man. “Talent,” says Weaver. “No scatter-armed outfielder will ever hit the cutoff, no matter how much you tell him where to throw the ball.” Orioles’ pitchers always try to get the lead runner. “Some clubs only practice that play a few days in spring training,” Singleton says. “Here, we practice it every day.”

The Oriole infield is competent but less brilliant than those of past teams. The marvelous Brooks Robinson is gone from third base, his place filled by Doug DeCinces, 28, a power at the plate (28 home runs last year) but erratic on defense. After breaking his nose four times, he has an unfortunate tendency to ole grounders hit his way: stand to the side and wave them past like an onrushing bull rather than plant himself in front of the ball. But Shortstop Belanger, Second Baseman Rich Dauer and Centerfielder Al Bumbry give the team strength up the middie, and Bumbry, a tiny (5 ft. 8 in.) sparkplug, ignites the running game. First Baseman Eddie Murray is a power hitter in the Boog Powell mold and a fine fielder. Not a household name among them, but they have proved potent enough to hold the Yankees, Red Sox and Brewers at bay. And, as always with an Earl Weaver team, a masterly balance of talent and the old Oriole try.

“When I came in, at age 37,” says Weaver, “I inherited three Hall of Famers, Brooks, Frank [Robinson] and Palmer. Since then, thanks to the organization, I’ve never had a bad ballplayer on my roster. Good ballplayers make good managers, not the other way around. All I can do is help them be as good as they are.”

Then the Baltimore manager pauses and claps his hands in that little gesture. “This bunch is pretty good, aren’t they? We’ve stayed up longer than Skylab.”