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IT'S WHAT YOU LEARN AFTER YOU KNOW IT ALL THAT COUNTS by Earl with Berry Stainback Weaver

IT'S WHAT YOU LEARN AFTER YOU KNOW IT ALL THAT COUNTS

By

Pub Date: June 1st, 1982
Publisher: Doubleday

Disappointingly, Weaver's guarded, first-person apologia doen't add much to Pluto's The Earl of Baltimore (p. 330). Since Weaver took command of the Orioles midway through the 1968 season, the club has won 60 percent of its games, finishing either first or second in the American League's Eastern Division eleven times and appearing in four World Series. Irascible Earl has gained equal celebrity for baiting umpires and feuding with star players. His aggravated assaults on the men in blue, says Weaver, are merely attempts to protect standout players from unjust ejections. And most of his confrontations with team members stem from misunderstandings of his greater-good philosophy. At Weaver's behest, the Orioles compile voluminous statistics on, for example, how each Baltimore hitter fares against rival starters and relievers. Invariably, the club's lineup reflects the results of prior engagements, and by-the-numbers bench riders frequently go public with their grievances--to Weaver's professed distress. Occasional insights of this sort and a handful of locker-room yarns apart, the bulk of this sporting-life bio consists of an ultimately tedious season-by-season narrative of Weaver's contentious diamond career. Along the way, he reports his own divorce and subsequent remarriage in the same dismissive way that he reviews who did and didn't make the rosters of the squads he piloted. There's more story here than we're getting. (Cf., again, Thomas Boswell.)