He swore he didn`t need this. He swore he was happy hustling a couple of strokes on each nine and cooking dinner for his wife and hanging around his house on the seventh fairway of the Country Club of Miami. He swore there wasn`t a minute he was sorry about retiring.
Yet Earl Weaver protested it wasn`t fair to ask if he had missed baseball, for the answer was so obvious. He had missed it as much as it had missed him, a small man whose absence left a large gap in the contemporary fabric of the game.
”I love being on the field,” he said. ”I love being in uniform.”
How apparent that was when he put on the uniform with the number, 4, his old team had retired a couple of years ago. Back in uniform, he fairly strutted about the Memorial Stadium field before Friday night`s game against Milwaukee.
The best thing about it was, when he came back, he fit right in. He was still hiding his cigarettes from TV cameras, still pushing the English language beyond the breaking point, still managing the Baltimore Orioles, still matching insults with his onetime pitching ace, Jim Palmer.
”Anything different about Earl?” Palmer was asked.
”He`s shorter,” said the pitcher-turned-broadcaster.
”Oh, he`s so polished,” Weaver retorted. ”I just wish he could have gotten some guys out.”
So it went in the hours before the first game Weaver would manage after 2 1/2 years in semiretirement. He had been a baseball consultant, a job whose terms were too nebulous to define, and an ABC broadcaster, a job in which he often used words no one could define.
Weaver was not made to be behind a microphone. Mincing words to avoid stepping on toes is not his game. Strangling words and trampling everything underfoot is more his style.
Yet he had relentlessly said no to inquiries about managing again–some 20 inquiries by his own count, including a serious one from the Cubs before Jim Frey was hired–until a sense of loyalty to the Orioles lured Weaver back to the bench. He was in a familiar room, one where he need not worry about tripping over the furniture.
”Where I sat in the dugout became automatic. What I did between innings became automatic,” he said. ”Each and every game, I`m going to feel more comfortable.”
Friday, he said, was an uncomfortably long day in every way except the 9-3 Orioles` victory that climaxed it. That meant Weaver wouldn`t need to open the bottle of 150 Rolaids someone had put on his desk in the Memorial Stadium clubhouse. It meant he had added a fraction of a point to a career winning percentage, .596, that ranks third on the all-time list for managers.
Weaver`s place in history was already secure, with one world championship, four pennants and six division titles in his previous 14 1/2 years of managing. None of his teams had ever played under .500; five of them had won 100 games in a season.
Yet he came back, to a team that had lost 17 of the previous 28 games before its previous manager, Joe Altobelli, was fired Thursday. Weaver accepted an estimated $500,000 to run the Orioles for the rest of the year. After that, who knows?
”Earl has nothing to lose,” said Brewers` manager George Bamberger, who was Weaver`s pitching coach for a decade. ”If he had a poor team, he would have something to lose.”
Yet the fear of losing, of tarnishing his reputation, stays with the 54-year-old Weaver, a man so combative he has been ejected by umpires from 89 major-league games, including one in spring training and one in the World Series. Weaver pounds clubs into the ground if he loses at golf and throws checkers if he loses at checkers.
”Failure is always in the back of your mind,” Weaver said. ”It is why no one in this game has to worry about complacency.”
The passion with which Weaver managed was ebbing when he announced his retirement during the 1982 season. The recurring nightmare of long days in hotel rooms on the road had driven him away from the game that was his entire life. When he left managing, Weaver began to wake up at 5:30 a.m. and go to sleep before the late news.
”The only question now,” Palmer said, ”is his intensity. Earl is Earl. He has to go about things the same way.”
That means playing for the big inning and arguing with umpires and berating players whose performance did not please him. Weaver`s skirmishes with Palmer and catcher Rick Dempsey were legendary, but they always fought like brothers, not enemies.
”Earl retired because he was tired of being the bad guy, of ignoring how people felt,” Palmer said. ”Earl was fair, but he didn`t care if you liked him or not.”
The Orioles will be disappointed if Weaver has mellowed. His first encounter with them, in Friday`s team meeting, left reliever Tippy Martinez convinced that little has changed.
”Whatever`s on his mind, that`s what is going to come out,” Martinez said. ”It`s nothing personal. He`s just a straightforward man.
”I know that once he gets a few games under his belt, he`ll go back to what he is. The game will definitely bring that out of him, whether he likes it or not.”
The original Weaver, the one who would never let a word do when there was room for a sentence, was back at the Friday morning press conference in which he explained his reasons for returning. He opened with a rambling, 15-minute monologue and confounded the answers to nearly every question with lengthy tangents.
”You sound like Casey Stengel,” a man offered.
”I`m trying to be more legible,” Weaver responded.
Reading the motivations behind his comeback was simpler. One was money:
Weaver, whose two-year contract as an ABC-TV baseball commentator was not renewed for this season, said he had asked Orioles` owner Edward Bennett Williams for a new consulting job when the idea of managing came up.
”Something within me said, `Okay, Earl, have some fun, put on the uniform, try to win some games, see what it`s like,` ” Weaver said. ”It`s a job, it`s not a challenge. I don`t want any challenges. I haven`t worked in 2 1/2 years. I`m looking forward to it.”
After that decision was made, he cited a prior commitment and let third-base coach Cal Ripken Sr. run the team Thursday. Weaver explained Friday the prior commitment was simply a desire to do some homework about the team he would inherit, the team that had won the World Series in 1983 but slipped to fifth last year. The Orioles were fourth, seven games behind first-place Toronto, when Weaver took over the club.
”Before this homestand is over, I should be very familiar with everyone on this ballclub and their capabilities,” Weaver said.
”I`m anxious to see how quickly we can pick up those games (behind Toronto),” said pitcher Sammy Stewart. ”I want to see what he does differently.
”Earl will make each day coming to the park more interesting. You never know what`s going to happen.”
Some 14,000 fans felt the same way Friday, when they bought tickets to boost Weaver`s reception committee past 39,000. Weaver made only one change, belying his superstition about letting the man who has brought out the lineup card continue to do it as long as the team wins.
Ripken had brought out the card in Thursday`s 8-3 win, but Weaver did it Friday. When he came out, unannounced, to exchange lineup cards with the Brewers` Bamberger, the fans began an 85-second ovation.
”I thought I better bring out the lineup card tonight,” he said.
”Otherwise, if things go right and we win, nobody will know I`m in the dugout. They`ll think I`ve got a previous commitment.”
When he later emerged from the dugout for a brief encounter with plate umpire Terry Cooney, he was the Earl Weaver they all knew, the one whose previous commitment had always been managing.
