Earl Weaver changed the game from the dugout. (Getty Images)

There are countless ways to eulogize the great Earl Weaver, and foremost among them should be this: The man was a baseball innovator.

Broadly speaking, Weaver managed during a time when run-scoring levels were low, but he rejected the small-ball strategies that prevailed in his day (e.g., the stolen base, the sac bunt and the hit-and-run). Instead, he was content to wait on the cherished "three-run homer" (a baseball event that he proudly invoked when defending his approach). "When you play for one run," he once sniffed, "that's usually all you'll get."

Weaver recognized he had but 27 outs in a game, and he wouldn't squander them. That was indeed a point of distinction.

Weaver also placed a premium on starting pitching. While that was nothing new, he did make a practice of having his young starters cut their teeth with a season in the bullpen.

He coveted defense and would, for instance, tolerate the banjo hitting of a Mark Belanger in order to get his glove on the field, at least in those early critical innings. He'd also lean heavily on his bench by pinch-hitting for those weak-hitting glove men at the earliest sign of a lead. Weaver was a dogmatic platooner and insisted every player on the roster use an established skill to fill a defined role.

Weaver leaned heavily upon his pitching coaches and took situational analysis of pitchers to new heights, at least among those inside organized baseball. Furthermore, as Tim Wendel points out in his book High Heat, Weaver was the first in MLB to embrace the use of the radar gun. Wendel writes:

Above all, Weaver had the most prominent hand in implementing the touchstones of the "Oriole Way," which embodied his baseball ideologies and eventually defined a generation of great Baltimore teams. When Weaver was once accused of being a "push-button manager," Orioles GM Harry Dalton quipped, "Push-button manager? He built the machine and installed all the buttons."

Yet even the word "manager," free of backhanded qualifiers, doesn't quite rise to meet Weaver's legacy. He was, in a genuine way, the philosopher-king of baseball's modern era.

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