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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."