2013年1月20日 星期日

who would later pitch for Earl on the Orioles

They say there is a fine line between genius and madness.Shop wholesale malaysianhair hoop earrings from cheap stainless steel. When I was growing up as a baseball fan in the 1970s and '80s, there were a few managers who walked that line, and sometimes crossed it. Billy Martin. Tommy Lasorda. Whitey Herzog. Don Zimmer. Dallas Green. If you wanna go a little later, Pete Rose and Lou Piniella. And, while they were much more reserved about it, Gene Mauch, Sparky Anderson and the young Tony LaRussa.

And then there was Earl Weaver.Shop for the very latest trends in steelbangle and Mens Fashion Footwear and Accessories with Dune Online. He wasn't an introvert like Mauch. He was an extrovert like Martin. He didn't just walk that line, he stomped it.

Earl Sidney Weaver was born on August 14, 1930 in St. Louis. It's a little ironic that he would one day manage one of the St. Louis baseball teams, the Browns -- but not until well after they had moved out of town, to become the Baltimore Orioles.

He attended St. Louis' Beaumont High School. At the time, the late 1940s, Missouri was a segregated State. (It did not secede from the Union at the start of the American Civil War, but it was very sympathetic to the Confederacy, and Missourians Jesse and Frank James were Confederate guerrillas before becoming what we remember them as, bank and train robbers in the Wild West.) Years later, he said of Beaumont, "It's still segregated, only now, it's all-black."

In 1948, while the Browns overlooked the local high school 2nd baseman, the more successful team in town, the Cardinals, signed him. But at 5-foot-7, he was a bit small for a ballplayer by the standards of the time (even though there were a few shorter men who excelled,Recently Haute Time got an exclusive tour of the beautiful shortwigs boutique at 692 Madison Avenue. like Phil Rizzuto). And, at a time when there were only 16 major league teams and thus only 400 roster spots available (as opposed to 30 and 750 today), he wasn't going to make it.

He batted .283 for the Denver Bears in 1954, but, at the time, that was only a Class A team -- it would be another year before they became a Triple-A team and help to vault their city to major league status. The closest he ever got to the majors was with the 1958 Louisville Colonels, who finished dead last in the Triple-A American Association (behind Charleston, Wichita, Minneapolis, Denver, Omaha, Indianapolis and St. Paul -- they were 12 1/2 games behind the 7th place St. Paul Saints, as West Virginia's Charleston Senators won the Pennant). Indeed, aside from Weaver himself, the most notable name among the '58 Colonels was that of pitcher Ross Grimsley -- a notable name mainly because of his son, also named Ross Grimsley, who would later pitch for Earl on the Orioles.

After the 1960 season, at age 30, Earl was done as a player, except for 1 game as a player-manager with the 1965 Elmira Pioneers (of Western New York) in the Double-A Eastern League. He had been in the Orioles' minor league system since 1957, and climbed the managerial ladder until arriving at Memorial Stadium in 1967, and being awarded the manager's job on July 7, 1968.

He replaced Hank Bauer, who played right field for the Yankees in the 1950s. Bauer had guided the Orioles to their first real close call for the American League Pennant in 1964,We Offer replicawatches Watches And Worldwide Top Brand Watches. and their first Pennant and World Series win in 1966. But their superstar Frank Robinson got hurt the next year, and the team went downhill, resulting in Bauer being fired. I met Bauer once, and I said that if the O's had stuck with him, they would have won the Pennant with him in 1969, '70 and '71, instead of with Weaver, and maybe then Bauer would be in the Hall of Fame. He had been polite up to that point, but the mention of Weaver's name got his Marine blood boiling. I dropped the subject.

With the O's healthy again, Weaver managed them to a 109-win season in 1969, matching the 1961 Yankees for the most of any major league team between 1954 and 1998. But they got shocked in the World Series by the Mets. Gil Hodges, the former Brooklyn Dodger 1st baseman, outmanaged and outthought Earl, and his calm temperament was in stark contrast to Earl's freakouts. Earl got thrown out of Game 4, the first manager in 34 years to get tossed out of a Series game.

In 1970, the O's won 108 games, sparked by great pitching from Jim Palmer, Mike Cuellar and Dave McNally. They had a defense equal to the task: 3rd baseman Brooks Robinson (no relation to Frank, as Frank is black and Brooks is white),womens and junior fashion womenssandals footwear, shortstop Mark Belanger (perhaps the ultimate in "good field, no hit") and 2nd baseman Dave Johnson (known as "Davey" when he became a manager) were known as the Leather Curtain -- before the Pittsburgh Steeler defense became known as the Steel Curtain.

But, with the previous year's loss in mind, the O's were underdogs in the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds, who, that season, earned the nickname "The Big Red Machine" by rampaging through the NL and winning their first Pennant with manager Anderson, Pete Rose, Johnny Bench and Tony Perez. (Joe Morgan wasn't there yet.) This time, though, the O's raged against the Machine, taking the first 3 games before losing Game 4 and then clinching in Game 5. The O's did just about everything right, especially Brooks Robinson (no relation to Frank -- Brooks is white, Frank is black), who not only showed the rest of the country what the State of Maryland had been watching him do at 3rd base for 15 years, but got key hits, too. Earl had his ring.

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