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“The Last Manager,” John Miller’s new biography of baseball Hall of Famer Earl Weaver, has two key pitches in its arsenal.One is a fastball down the pipe: Weaver, as long-time fans recall, was a cantankerous throwback who theatrically harried umpires and routinely got tossed from games, all on the way to four World Series appearances (including two against the Pittsburgh Pirates) and one Series win with the Baltimore Orioles.The other pitch is a sneaky change-up: Weaver was a visionary, whose prescient use of technology and statistics starting in the late 1960s prefigured now-ubiquitous baseball strategies so effectively that it helped make managers like him obsolete.

Weaver, who died in 2013, is the subject of a vivid new biography, ​“The Last Manager,” by the writer and former Orioles scout John W. Miller. Most sports books are pop flies to the infield. Miller’s is a screaming triple into the left field corner. He takes Weaver seriously; he understands why his tenure mattered to baseball; he is alert to the details of the unruly pageant that was his life; he explains, a bit ruefully, why he was probably the last of his kind, an unkempt dinosaur who ruled before the data geckos came into power.