"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. . . . Before Moneyball, before Beane, before Bill James--but not quite before Copernicus--Weaver, a white-haired gnome who never played a day of major league baseball, knew what worked. The most recent generation of general managers, armed with their computer printouts and Ivy League-educated assistants, all channel something from the Earl of Baltimore." --Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated

"Earl Weaver was a manager for all seasons. Some guys are good when they're got a winning ball club, but when things start to go bad, they don't know what to do. Or they're a good manager with a good ball club, but a bad manager with a bad ball club. Or they look like a pretty good manager, but they've never been in a pennant race. Earl had everything. He drank his brains out. But he was a fucking genius." --Frank Cashen, Baltimore Orioles GM 1971-1975

"I made no bones about it when I first got the job: I always wanted the next Earl Weaver as manager." --Billy Beane, Oakland A's GM 1997-2015

"He used everybody. Probably more than any other manager in history, Weaver had carefully defined roles for every player on his roster--not because he cared about the players, but because he cared about the games. It was important to Weaver to have a player matched up in his mind with every possible game situation." --Bill James

"Weaver will remain most famous for his red-faced, hoarsely screaming set-tos with the umps, which produced hilarious photos, thanks to the size differential, but even here he was an intellectual at heart, having discovered that tipping the bill of his cap to one side would allow him to get an inch or two closer to the arbiter's jaw, without incurring the automatic ejection of the tiniest physical contact. What Earl wanted, what he battled for and talked about and thought about endlessly, was that edge, the single pitch or particular play or minuscule advantage that could turn an inning or a day or a season his way. Long before Billy Ball, he had his coaches keep multicolored pitching and batting charts that told him which of his batters did well or poorly against each righty or lefty flinger in the league, and where on the field well-hit enemy line drives against one of his starters' or relievers' sliders or fastballs would probably land." --Roger Angell, New Yorker

"Weaver marshaled a scholar's familiarity with the rule book, a statistician's data, a psychologist's motivational skills, and a heckler's needle into a relentless advocacy for the Orioles." --Bruce Weber, New York Times

"Showman, scrapper, innovator, champion--this baseball manager did it all. . . . Unlike many of today's relatively mild, predictable managers, Weaver was a crowd-pleasing ham and a rule-flouting trailblazer. An illuminating, entertaining biography of a mercurial tactician who changed the national pastime." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)