Earl Weaver, the banty, umpire-contentious, Hall of Fame manager of the Orioles, who died Friday, was the best naked talker I ever heard. Deadline-aware writers, seeking him out in his office shortly after another last out, would often find him behind his desk gnawing on a chicken wing, sans uniform and undies: a five-foot-seven, birthday-suited unsentimentalist still alight with the complexities and hovering alternate possibilities of the trifling game we’d all just attended. His seventeen-year—1968-86—run at the helm in Baltimore (he retired at the end of the 1982 season, then thought better of it a couple of years later) produced teams that won ninety or more games in twelve seasons, along with four American League pennants, and one World Championship: the second-best managerial record of the century. He will remain most famous for his red-faced, hoarsely screaming set-tos with the umps, which produced hilarious photos, thanks to the size differential, but even here he was an intellectual at heart, having discovered that tipping the bill of his cap to one side would allow him to get an inch or two closer to the arbiter’s jaw, without incurring the automatic ejection of the tiniest physical contact.

What Earl wanted, what he battled for and talked about and thought about endlessly, was that edge, the single pitch or particular play or minuscule advantage that could turn an inning or a day or a season his way. Long before Billy Ball, he had his coaches keep multicolored pitching and batting charts that told him which of his batters did well or poorly against each righty or lefty flinger in the league, and where on the field well-hit enemy line drives against one of his starters’ or relievers’ sliders or fastballs would probably land.

He took eminent, top-performance players—Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson, Mark Belanger, Ken Singleton—played them every day, and barely spoke to them for games and seasons on end. Perhaps he secretly savored more his left-field platoon of the right-handed-batting Gary Roenicke and left-batting John Lowenstein, since they presented an irritating little difficulty for the other manager when making out his starting lineup. Most of all, I think, Earl loved his perpetually available left-handed pinch-hitter Terry Crowley, the primo late-inning, other-manager’s dilemma of that era.

“Oh, I love this stuff,” Earl would exclaim, perhaps only talking about the trifling game when he’d tried an outfielder, John Shelby, at second base for a few innings, in place of the slumping Rich Dauer: “Shelby at second gives us an extra move, and I’ll go with it.... If you’re losing, go for offense. Look for that move.”

Talent mattered, too. In 1982, raving about his rookie infielder Cal Ripken, whom he had lately shifted from third base to shortstop, he said, “Wherever he plays, you can write him in for the next fifteen years, because that’s how good he is.” Yep—and thanks, Earl.

But let me tack on one more exchange, just before his retirement, which I initiated with the suggestion that he’d surely be back in baseball again before long, perhaps as a coach with a college or even a high-school team somewhere.

“I hate kids and I hate fucking kid baseball,” he barked, startling us both to laughter. All he wanted was the real thing, the edge and nothing less.

Photograph: Focus on Sport/Getty Images