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A bantam in both stature — he was 5 feet 7 inches, maybe — and temperament, Weaver was among the most influential managers in modern baseball history, and among the most combative as well. His imperiousness as a leader made battles with his players as frequent as those with umpires.

Aware that the outcome of any season might rest on the outcome of any game, and that the outcome of any game on a play, a pitch or an umpire's call, he marshaled a scholar's familiarity with the rule book, a statistician's data, a psychologist's motivational skills and a heckler's needle into a relentless advocacy for the Orioles.

"On my tombstone just write, 'The Sorest Loser Who Ever Lived,' " he said in 1986, his final season.

He managed the Orioles as a pragmatist rather than as a hunch player, drawing on his observations during a two-decade career in the minor leagues, first as a good-field-no-hit infielder and later as a manager. Weaver relished hitters who could get on base and hit the long ball, starting pitchers who could go deep in a game and fielders who could steal runs.

"Pitching, defense and the three-run homer," was Weaver's stated formula for winning ballgames.

Weaver's Orioles featured a number of great players — including the Hall of Famers Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, Eddie Murray and Jim Palmer — but knowing that depth helped win pennants, he was a shrewd roster builder. He chose players to fill in the gaps around his stars, not necessarily for their overall ability or athleticism but for their isolated skills — a good outfield arm, base running speed, power — and then deployed them in situations where they were most likely to succeed.

In 1979, for example, his left-field platoon of John Lowenstein and Gary Roenicke, two middling players, combined for 36 home runs and 98 runs batted in, All-Star figures for any outfielder.

"The man's a genius at finding situations where an average player — like me — can look like a star because of subtle factors working in your favor," Lowenstein said in 1982. "He has a passion for finding the perfect player for the perfect spot."

Weaver's game strategy was built around treasuring each of his team's allotted 27 outs and protecting them by eschewing conventional gambits like the sacrifice bunt and the hit-and-run. And he is often credited for his pioneering use of statistics in the dugout.

Long before computer analyses and sabermetrics (the study of baseball statistics) became integral to managerial strategy, long before the so-called Moneyball era that championed on-base percentage and slugging percentage as crucial measures of a player's value, Weaver recognized that baseball's traditional measures of success — batting average, earned run average and the like — were insufficient for his purposes.

He knew, for example, that certain hitters fared better against certain pitchers and that sometimes weak hitters were better against some pitchers than stronger hitters were. So he kept tabs on, among other things, how each of his hitters had performed in the past against individual pitchers on opposing teams.

The weak-hitting shortstop Mark Belanger was often sent in to play when Jim Kern, a fireballing relief pitcher for Cleveland, Texas and others, was on the mound: inexplicably, Belanger hit .625 against him in his career.

In 1975, during spring training, Weaver introduced the use of a radar gun to measure the speed of pitchers' pitches.

"Weaver was the Copernicus of baseball," Tom Verducci wrote in Sports Illustrated in 2009. "Just as Copernicus understood heliocentric cosmology a full century before the invention of the telescope, Weaver understood smart baseball a generation before it was empirically demonstrated."

Weaver managed the Orioles from 1968 through 1982, then came out of retirement in mid-1985 and managed the team through the end of 1986. His overall record was 1,480 victories and 1,060 losses, a .583 winning percentage, ninth in major league history, and his only losing season was his last.

With a sandpaper voice, a taste for beer (he was twice charged with drunken driving) and a tense, competitive manner, Weaver was a crusty personality, though he had a sharp wit and a well-developed sense of mischief. Once when outfielder Pat Kelly was irritated that Weaver was not giving him enough time for a pregame prayer meeting, he said, "Earl, don't you want us to walk with the Lord?" Weaver replied that he would rather have Kelly walk with the bases loaded.

A chain smoker who puffed on Raleighs between innings in the passageway from the clubhouse to the dugout, Weaver considered it improper to be friendly with his players lest his feelings impede his ability to make decisions about them.

He contended that he rarely spoke to stars like Frank Robinson, and his long-running relationships with other players — notably Palmer and catcher Rick Dempsey — were testy, though many admired his competitive zeal and his winning record.

"Earl is right, you can't be friends with players," Dempsey said in an interview with the The New York Times in 1982. "And Earl manages to be unfriendly with players. We alienate each other when it comes time to go on the field. He wants pitchers to call their own games. But if the pitcher gets hit, I get blamed."

But most fans will remember Weaver for his tirades against umpires. He was ejected from nearly 100 games, often after colorful displays of temper with the beak of his cap turned around so he wouldn't accidentally rap the ump in the forehead with it.

Once, after Weaver had been ejected and the umpire Jim Evans pulled out a stopwatch to give him 60 seconds to leave the field before the Orioles would forfeit the game, Weaver snatched the stopwatch out of Evans's hand and flung it into the dugout. Once he tore up a rule book in front of an umpire's face and tossed the confetti into the wind.

In 1980, in the first inning of a game between the Orioles and the Detroit Tigers, Weaver objected to a first-inning balk call by Bill Haller, and the two men engaged in a marathon, profanity-laced shouting match that was caught on videotape and has since become a YouTube favorite.

"I'd get so mad I couldn't see straight," Weaver said to Playboy in 1982. "I mean, just a wrong ball or strike call can cost you a game. Well, that can cost me my job! Now I can't send my kids through college!"

He added: "If an umpire misses a called third strike and the other side ends up scoring because of it, I'm not going to forget it. If there are runners on second and third and two out, and if the umpire has just given the hitter an extra strike and the next pitch goes into the hole and both runs score, I've got to say something to the guy. With that one call, he's keeping my kid from going to school!"

Earl Sidney Weaver was born on Aug. 14, 1930, in St. Louis, where his father was a dry cleaner whose customers included the Cardinals and the Browns. He immersed himself in baseball from boyhood, playing second base in high school and, in spite of being a weak hitter and a slow runner, he earned contract offers from both local professional teams for his good glove and heady play.

He signed with the Cardinals, in 1948, embarking on a minor league career that lasted two decades. By 1956, he was managing as well as playing, and in 1957 he joined the Orioles organization, which was intrigued by his managerial skill. From then on, as he recognized he would not make it to the big leagues as a player, he managed more and played less.

"It broke my heart," he told Time magazine in 1979, "but right then I started becoming a good baseball person, because when I came to recognize, and more important, accept my own deficiencies, then I could recognize other players' inabilities and learn to accept them, not for what they can't do, but for what they can do. And in the process, I suppose, I broke some hearts."

In the minors, Weaver developed his strategic skill as well as his penchant for umpire baiting. One one occasion, after a close fair-foul call against him on a shot down the third-base line, he tore the bag out of the ground and stormed off with it, explaining to the umpire, "You're not using this anyway."

The Orioles promoted him to the big leagues as a first-base coach in April 1968, and in July, with the team in third place, he replaced Hank Bauer as manager; the Orioles finished second, then won the American League pennant the next year, winning 109 games during the regular season.

To the astonishment of all, however, they lost the World Series to a team widely believed to be inferior: the so-called Miracle Mets. In Game 4, won by the Mets, Weaver was ejected, the first manager to be thrown out of a World Series game in 34 years.

In 1970, the Orioles won 108 games and did win the Series, defeating the Cincinnati Reds.

And in 1971, they were American League champions again, one of only two teams in major league history (the 1920 Chicago White Sox were other) with four 20-game winning pitchers — Palmer, Mike Cuellar, Dave McNally and Pat Dobson — but lost the Series to the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The Orioles lost to the Pirates again in 1979, dropping the Series in seven games after leading by three games to one. In a Sporting News poll of other managers, Weaver won the Manager of the Year award anyway.

When he retired the first time in 1982, he was only 52.

"I really don't like confrontations," Weaver said that year. "One of the reasons I'm retiring is that I'm tired of hurting people's feelings."

Weaver's first marriage ended in divorce. His survivors include his second wife, the former Marianna Osgood, whom he married in 1964.

Weaver collected his wit and wisdom in two books, "It's What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts," a memoir written with Berry Stainback, and, "Weaver on Strategy," with Terry Pluto. He was voted into the Hall of Fame in 1996, and in his induction speech he gave surprising thanks to a group he often seemed to revile: the umpires.

"I'm serious when I say their integrity and honesty is, and must be, beyond reproach," he said, in part. "They accept the players' and managers' ire and they never let it affect their next call. Now counting balls and strikes, and close plays on the bases, they must have made over a million calls while I was managing, and except for those 91 or 92 times I disagreed, they got the other ones right."