And it isn't one you have head before Mike:
"The Gamblers and Hustlers That Made Baseball's Greatest Manager
Earl Weaver learned about playing the odds from his bookmaker uncle. Those lessons would turn him into a pioneer of modern analytics.
By John W. Miller
It was mostly public relations. The talk died down, but the action didn't. In subsequent decades, the bookies just kept showing up at the ballpark. Gamblers, as legendary former owner Bill Veeck once said, are "good customers of a ball club."
Few people knew this better than one of the most prominent Midwestern bookies of the 1930s and 1940s, a St. Louis wiseguy named Edward "Bud" Bochert. He roamed the grandstand at Sportsman's Park behind first base and the right-field bleachers, offering the same types of prop bets on pitch counts, runs, and hits, and parlays on combinations of outcomes, that you can now access legally on your phone.
Bochert liked to bring along his favorite nephew. His name was Earl Weaver, who would grow up to become the greatest manager of the modern eraand whose exposure to the gambling world helped make him into an early prophet of baseball analytics.
A generation before Moneyball, as the longtime manager of the Baltimore Orioles, Weaver valued drawing walks, high on-base averages, power-based offenses, and innovative uses of strategy, and technology. He was also the first manager to deploy a radar gun to measure pitching velocities.
The results speak for themselves. Among managers with over 1,000 wins since division play began in 1969, Weaver has a .583 winning percentage that ranks as the best in baseball. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1996.
Unlike another gritty 20th Century baseball hero Pete Rose, there's no evidence that Weaver ever bet on a Major League Baseball game during his career, but a culture saturated by gambling was the perfect environment for young Earl Weaver to grasp the elements of the game that actually went into manufacturing wins.
"Earl talked like a bookmaker," said Dan Duquette, who hired Weaver to instruct his manager and coaches when he was general manager of the Montreal Expos in the 1990s.
Weaver peppered his postgame comments with gambling analogies. "Sometimes the ground decides the game," he said once, comparing baseball to a dog race. "You don't want to lose your money on some fing pebble. I had money on two dogs once who were leading the field. They bit each other."
After one loss, he said: "If we had been at a craps table tonight, we'd be broke. If we were playing blackjack, we would have had 12 every deal. If we had been betting on the horses, the things would still be running, and if we were betting on the doggies, those things would have got stuck in the box."
As a boy, Weaver worshiped his small-time mobster uncle. Bud helped young Earl get jobs, taught him golf, and shared how things were going in the bookmaking business, and Earl relished his occasional windfalls. Earl once saw him pull $70,000, 50 times the average annual American income in 1940, out of an ottoman in the family living room. "He was always handing out cash" to family members, said Mike Weaver, Earl's son.
In telling Bud's story, Weaver shielded his mentor and his rogue's den of thieves, pimps, bookies, boxers, and bartenders. But he and newspaper and police records have revealed enough to see the man's lingering effects in Earl's streetwise humor, his hustler's craving for an edge, his skill at cards, his love of a good wager, and his contempt for authority.
If Earl Weaver Sr., who tolerated but didn't appreciate his brother-in-law, was an attentive and caring dad, Uncle Bud was a darker force, whose spirit Weaver channeled every time he threatened to knock an umpire "right on your ass." Among other misdeeds, Bud was arrested for beating up a former prosecutor and shooting his wife in the hip during a drunken quarrel.
During the 1930s and 1940s, gangs in St. Louis controlled swaths of the city's economy, unions, and politics, ran betting rings, and collected protection money. Gambling was everywhere, in corner craps games, tavern numbers rackets, baseball, boxing and horse-racing books, and blackjack, poker, and pinochle. Mobsters loved baseball because it was part of their gambling business, but also because they were fans.
Bud, a thick, heavyset man, ran a city gambling den, the Parkview Buffet, which was frequently raided by cops, forcing him to grab his betting sheets and scram. He'd been born into a St. Louis crime family in 1902, and in 1931 married Irene, Earl's aunt.
The betting public Uncle Bud and other bookies sought out back then were the people they called the "squares," naive baseball fans who wanted to wager a few dollars on the home team. Bookies were more careful about taking money from the "sharps," professional gamblers who paid closer attention to the games.
The sharps can be considered baseball's first real sabermetricians, combing available data in the search for an edge.
In 1942, a bookie from Ohio named Samuel J. Georgeson published Pitchers Record Guide, a book with pitcher statistics from the previous season, breakdowns versus specific teams, and charts that allowed gamblers to track the performance of pitchers against individual teams during the current season. "It can be of extreme value to know that a certain pitcher is almost always successful against a certain team, but seldom wins against another," Georgeson wrote in the guide.
As far back as 1956, an article in Esquire had also described a baseball betting system based on 1-10 ratings for evaluating pitchers that relied on earned-run averages, strikeouts, and bases on balls, while disregarding win-loss records. "A pitcher, after being hit hard, can leave a game at the end of the fifth inning with the score 8-to-6 in his favor and be credited with a victory because his team eventually won the game," the magazine noted. It is "the ratio between his strikeouts and his [walks]" that bookies look for, he wrote, preceding the insights of modern analysts by decades.
Over a quarter-century later, Earl Weaver introduced to big-league dugouts an awareness of the variability and complexity of matchups of his team's hitters against specific pitchers, and vice versa.
As Bill James and others advanced their study of baseball in the 1970s, the gambling community kept pace. In 1979, Jim Jasper, a bookie who'd worked on baseball since the 1950s, wrote in his book Sports Betting that any manager who made a nonpitcher bunt was "an idiot" because "the idea is not to make an out. To make outs on purpose is crazy. They will argue that they are playing for one run. This only makes sense if that one run wins the game right then and there. The big inning wins games."
He added: "The intentional walk is another piece of bad strategy, especially early in the game. Again, the idea is to get the other side out, not put them on."
Not wasting outs was at the core of Weaver's thinking as a manager. "Your most precious possession on offense are your twenty-seven outs," he wrote as his Fourth Law in his 1984 book, Weaver on Strategy.
In March 2023, I performed an experiment in how betting can clarify your vision of baseball strategy. I attended a World Baseball Classic contest in Phoenix between USA and England. The spreadthe minimum number of runs the favored team has to win bywas 8.5 in favor of the home team. I bet $100 on USA. It felt like a safe bet: The USA team included stars Mookie Betts, Mike Trout, and Trea Turner. England was headlined by Vance Worley, Ian Gibaut, and Harry Ford. The U.S. won, but only 62. I lost $100. The promise of easy cash slipping away changed how I watched the game.
If I hadn't bet money, I would still have rooted for USA, but I wouldn't have cared how many runs they scored. But because I needed USA to cover the spread, I paid close attention to their offensive strategy. I wanted them to take pitches, draw walks, and hit home runs. I was mad if a player swung at the first pitch and popped up. Paying attention to run spreads like a gambler basically forces you to endorse a modern, Earl Weaver-style offense.
The Esquire piece made another recommendation that reveals an insight 1940s and 1950s gamblers had about baseball, the same one I had when I lost $100 betting on USA at the World Baseball Classic: If there's a run spread, bet on the team that plays for big innings instead of the team that bunts a lot and plays for one run at a time. "This is the first time," Esquire concluded in 1956, "that a formula has been conceived which is able to defeat the daily baseball 'line' during an entire season's play."
Earl Weaver continued to associate with Uncle Bud in the 1950s, but by the time he had reached the major leagues in 1968, Bud was out of sight. Ballplayers and managers could be suspended for merely associating with known gamblers.
Bud, who died in 1977, retired to the suburbs and was getting out of the gambling business in the 1960s and 1970s, according to family members. A cousin recalled him as a docile old man who liked playing cards with his wife. But he did keep some side hustles. He once gave one of Earl Weaver's cousins a pony he won in a card game."
Adapted from "The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball" by John W. Miller, to be published by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster on March 4, 2025. Copyright 2025 by John W. Miller. Printed by arrangement with Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
Since it s a promotional article for the book, I'm offering it verbatim without redaction. Original source of the article:
https://www.wsj.com/sports/baseball/earl-weaver-the-last-manager-3189db81
"The Gamblers and Hustlers That Made Baseball's Greatest Manager
Earl Weaver learned about playing the odds from his bookmaker uncle. Those lessons would turn him into a pioneer of modern analytics.
By John W. Miller
It was mostly public relations. The talk died down, but the action didn't. In subsequent decades, the bookies just kept showing up at the ballpark. Gamblers, as legendary former owner Bill Veeck once said, are "good customers of a ball club."
Few people knew this better than one of the most prominent Midwestern bookies of the 1930s and 1940s, a St. Louis wiseguy named Edward "Bud" Bochert. He roamed the grandstand at Sportsman's Park behind first base and the right-field bleachers, offering the same types of prop bets on pitch counts, runs, and hits, and parlays on combinations of outcomes, that you can now access legally on your phone.
Bochert liked to bring along his favorite nephew. His name was Earl Weaver, who would grow up to become the greatest manager of the modern eraand whose exposure to the gambling world helped make him into an early prophet of baseball analytics.
A generation before Moneyball, as the longtime manager of the Baltimore Orioles, Weaver valued drawing walks, high on-base averages, power-based offenses, and innovative uses of strategy, and technology. He was also the first manager to deploy a radar gun to measure pitching velocities.
The results speak for themselves. Among managers with over 1,000 wins since division play began in 1969, Weaver has a .583 winning percentage that ranks as the best in baseball. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1996.
Unlike another gritty 20th Century baseball hero Pete Rose, there's no evidence that Weaver ever bet on a Major League Baseball game during his career, but a culture saturated by gambling was the perfect environment for young Earl Weaver to grasp the elements of the game that actually went into manufacturing wins.
"Earl talked like a bookmaker," said Dan Duquette, who hired Weaver to instruct his manager and coaches when he was general manager of the Montreal Expos in the 1990s.
Weaver peppered his postgame comments with gambling analogies. "Sometimes the ground decides the game," he said once, comparing baseball to a dog race. "You don't want to lose your money on some fing pebble. I had money on two dogs once who were leading the field. They bit each other."
After one loss, he said: "If we had been at a craps table tonight, we'd be broke. If we were playing blackjack, we would have had 12 every deal. If we had been betting on the horses, the things would still be running, and if we were betting on the doggies, those things would have got stuck in the box."
As a boy, Weaver worshiped his small-time mobster uncle. Bud helped young Earl get jobs, taught him golf, and shared how things were going in the bookmaking business, and Earl relished his occasional windfalls. Earl once saw him pull $70,000, 50 times the average annual American income in 1940, out of an ottoman in the family living room. "He was always handing out cash" to family members, said Mike Weaver, Earl's son.
In telling Bud's story, Weaver shielded his mentor and his rogue's den of thieves, pimps, bookies, boxers, and bartenders. But he and newspaper and police records have revealed enough to see the man's lingering effects in Earl's streetwise humor, his hustler's craving for an edge, his skill at cards, his love of a good wager, and his contempt for authority.
If Earl Weaver Sr., who tolerated but didn't appreciate his brother-in-law, was an attentive and caring dad, Uncle Bud was a darker force, whose spirit Weaver channeled every time he threatened to knock an umpire "right on your ass." Among other misdeeds, Bud was arrested for beating up a former prosecutor and shooting his wife in the hip during a drunken quarrel.
During the 1930s and 1940s, gangs in St. Louis controlled swaths of the city's economy, unions, and politics, ran betting rings, and collected protection money. Gambling was everywhere, in corner craps games, tavern numbers rackets, baseball, boxing and horse-racing books, and blackjack, poker, and pinochle. Mobsters loved baseball because it was part of their gambling business, but also because they were fans.
Bud, a thick, heavyset man, ran a city gambling den, the Parkview Buffet, which was frequently raided by cops, forcing him to grab his betting sheets and scram. He'd been born into a St. Louis crime family in 1902, and in 1931 married Irene, Earl's aunt.
The betting public Uncle Bud and other bookies sought out back then were the people they called the "squares," naive baseball fans who wanted to wager a few dollars on the home team. Bookies were more careful about taking money from the "sharps," professional gamblers who paid closer attention to the games.
The sharps can be considered baseball's first real sabermetricians, combing available data in the search for an edge.
In 1942, a bookie from Ohio named Samuel J. Georgeson published Pitchers Record Guide, a book with pitcher statistics from the previous season, breakdowns versus specific teams, and charts that allowed gamblers to track the performance of pitchers against individual teams during the current season. "It can be of extreme value to know that a certain pitcher is almost always successful against a certain team, but seldom wins against another," Georgeson wrote in the guide.
As far back as 1956, an article in Esquire had also described a baseball betting system based on 1-10 ratings for evaluating pitchers that relied on earned-run averages, strikeouts, and bases on balls, while disregarding win-loss records. "A pitcher, after being hit hard, can leave a game at the end of the fifth inning with the score 8-to-6 in his favor and be credited with a victory because his team eventually won the game," the magazine noted. It is "the ratio between his strikeouts and his [walks]" that bookies look for, he wrote, preceding the insights of modern analysts by decades.
Over a quarter-century later, Earl Weaver introduced to big-league dugouts an awareness of the variability and complexity of matchups of his team's hitters against specific pitchers, and vice versa.
As Bill James and others advanced their study of baseball in the 1970s, the gambling community kept pace. In 1979, Jim Jasper, a bookie who'd worked on baseball since the 1950s, wrote in his book Sports Betting that any manager who made a nonpitcher bunt was "an idiot" because "the idea is not to make an out. To make outs on purpose is crazy. They will argue that they are playing for one run. This only makes sense if that one run wins the game right then and there. The big inning wins games."
He added: "The intentional walk is another piece of bad strategy, especially early in the game. Again, the idea is to get the other side out, not put them on."
Not wasting outs was at the core of Weaver's thinking as a manager. "Your most precious possession on offense are your twenty-seven outs," he wrote as his Fourth Law in his 1984 book, Weaver on Strategy.
In March 2023, I performed an experiment in how betting can clarify your vision of baseball strategy. I attended a World Baseball Classic contest in Phoenix between USA and England. The spreadthe minimum number of runs the favored team has to win bywas 8.5 in favor of the home team. I bet $100 on USA. It felt like a safe bet: The USA team included stars Mookie Betts, Mike Trout, and Trea Turner. England was headlined by Vance Worley, Ian Gibaut, and Harry Ford. The U.S. won, but only 62. I lost $100. The promise of easy cash slipping away changed how I watched the game.
If I hadn't bet money, I would still have rooted for USA, but I wouldn't have cared how many runs they scored. But because I needed USA to cover the spread, I paid close attention to their offensive strategy. I wanted them to take pitches, draw walks, and hit home runs. I was mad if a player swung at the first pitch and popped up. Paying attention to run spreads like a gambler basically forces you to endorse a modern, Earl Weaver-style offense.
The Esquire piece made another recommendation that reveals an insight 1940s and 1950s gamblers had about baseball, the same one I had when I lost $100 betting on USA at the World Baseball Classic: If there's a run spread, bet on the team that plays for big innings instead of the team that bunts a lot and plays for one run at a time. "This is the first time," Esquire concluded in 1956, "that a formula has been conceived which is able to defeat the daily baseball 'line' during an entire season's play."
Earl Weaver continued to associate with Uncle Bud in the 1950s, but by the time he had reached the major leagues in 1968, Bud was out of sight. Ballplayers and managers could be suspended for merely associating with known gamblers.
Bud, who died in 1977, retired to the suburbs and was getting out of the gambling business in the 1960s and 1970s, according to family members. A cousin recalled him as a docile old man who liked playing cards with his wife. But he did keep some side hustles. He once gave one of Earl Weaver's cousins a pony he won in a card game."
Adapted from "The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball" by John W. Miller, to be published by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster on March 4, 2025. Copyright 2025 by John W. Miller. Printed by arrangement with Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
Since it s a promotional article for the book, I'm offering it verbatim without redaction. Original source of the article:
https://www.wsj.com/sports/baseball/earl-weaver-the-last-manager-3189db81