When Earl Weaver died in January 2013, John W. Miller was covering the steel industry for the Wall Street Journal.

But someone on the sports desk knew Miller was a baseball nut — a former college player at Mount St. Mary’s, a youth coach for most of his 20s, a men’s league player until he was 33 and briefly a scout for the Orioles in Europe — and asked him to pen Weaver’s obituary.

“As I was writing it, I was like, ‘Man, this story is so good,’” Miller said in a phone interview Friday. “His life is such an amazing, interesting, important baseball life. I just felt like I had command of the story and was intrigued by it.”

A little more than 12 years later, Miller’s biography of Weaver — “The Last Manager: How Early Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball — will hit shelves Tuesday.

The book, the first major biography of the Hall of Fame manager, details Weaver’s life from his childhood growing up in St. Louis during the Depression to his path in becoming one of baseball’s best managers to his legacy as a tactical genius who was ahead of his time. Miller, now a contributing writer at America Magazine, interviewed more than 200 people, including the son of Weaver’s high school baseball coach, Cal Ripken Jr., Weaver’s family and former umpires who ejected the manager.

Before the first chapter begins, the famous picture of Weaver throwing out umpire Don Denkinger during a game in 1977 previews the next 350 pages, with Miller describing the skipper as “king of managers when managers were kings.”

“To me, he’s one of the great characters in baseball history,” Miller said. “He’s somebody who embodies the best of baseball — the combativeness, competitiveness, the fun, the silliness sometimes, the showmanship. There’s no one today who’s as great a showman as he was.”

Writing Weaver’s obituary was the “trigger” for Miller to pursue a book, but his upbringing as an American growing up in Belgium made the author primed to dive deep into the baseball firebrand. He’d read newspaper articles about baseball, his favorites by former Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell. His grandfather would send him cassette tapes of Jon Miller announcing Orioles games on WBAL radio, and the young Miller would listen to them “over and over again.” Any time his family visited the United States, Miller’s uncles would take him to watch the Orioles at Memorial Stadium.

“I got the bug,” Miller said. “When you’re an American growing up overseas, you kind of latch onto certain things about America. For me, it was baseball.”

While Miller doesn’t shy away from the flawed man Weaver was, the author’s admiration for his subject and those great Orioles teams is clear throughout “The Last Manager.”

“The book is trying to be objective and journalistic,” Miller said. “But I’m definitely coming from a point of view of somebody who’s in love with the story of the Orioles and how this underdog team became the greatest team of the ’70s.”

When Miller began working on the book in 2020, he realized many parts of Weaver’s story had never been told. Hall of Famer Jim Palmer, whose Weaver stories are the stuff of legend, had the same reaction when he read “The Last Manager.”

“Earl was much more interesting than I ever knew,” Palmer posted on X.

The biography walks the reader through Weaver’s life from “depression gangsters to Silicon Valley tech bros,” Miller said. The former anecdote is about Weaver’s mobster uncle, while the latter is referencing Weaver’s trip to California to work with Electronic Arts in developing “Earl Weaver Baseball.”

The book also describes Weaver’s journey from growing up “in a racist environment” to someone who managed during the height of Black participation in the major leagues.

“The evolution wasn’t some feel-good, woke story,” Miller said. “There’s a complexity about it that feels more real than a lot of the discourse we have today.”

A major part of Weaver’s legacy has only been made greater by how baseball is played today. “Moneyball,” the famous Michael Lewis book about the Oakland Athletics that detailed the rise of analytics in baseball, mentions Weaver as being ahead of his time with “The Oriole Way” and his style of “pitching, defense and three-run homers.”

“More than any other baseball leader of his day, Earl Weaver saw straight into baseball’s future,” Miller writes in his book. “The Orioles manager was so good at his job and figured out so many things about baseball, without the benefit of a computer, that you could make the claim that he made his own job obsolete. Once computers came along, you didn’t even need a manager anymore. You could just program them to think like Earl Weaver.”

Miller said he “always dreamed about writing a book,” detailing the biography as “very much my life’s work.” His original name for it was just, “The Manager,” but his publisher wanted the title to make an argument about Weaver’s legacy.

“He was the last dinosaur, the last lion,” Miller said.

Have a news tip? Contact Jacob Calvin Meyer at jameyer@baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/JCalvinMeyer.