Baseball Managers and Leader Development: A Diamond in the Rough?

By SIOP Fellow Paul E. Levy, Ph.D.

After two years in the president’s office as VP and chief of staff at my beloved University of Akron, I recently returned to my career home – UA’s Psychology Department and I-O Program. Of course with that return came a teaching load, which included a new graduate course that I called Leadership, Development and Coaching. For the leader development portion of the course we poured through Dave Day’s (a UAkron grad) awesome new text called “Developing Leaders and Leadership: Principles, Practices, and Processes (2024).” I will borrow a good bit from that important source here.

What does this have to do with baseball? Good question. As a lifelong baseball fan and native Baltimorean, the Orioles are my team – not an easy admission this season, but I will stay true – I’ve always wondered about managers, what they mean to their teams and how they got there.

My purpose here is to think aloud using what we know about leader development to shine a light on how these managers become leaders in their franchises. Most experts would agree that the development of leaders is a long-term endeavor and one that is centered on adult development and lifelong learning. Day (2024) talks about this and many other important elements at length, but since it’s my blog post, I get to pick and choose what I talk about from his work.

Unlike other mid-level managers, baseball managers do not typically come from different industries. They possess a multitude of baseball-related experiences gained through their playing days and their coaching/managerial days in the minor leagues. These capabilities and experiences lead to some important developmental indicators that impact outcomes further downstream.

These indicators of leader development include leadership self-efficacy. We aren’t in the clubhouse or on the field (although I’d love to be!), but media representations of managers do not suggest that many successful ones are lacking in leadership self-efficacy – they tend to believe in their capabilities. Leader identity is another important indicator and, although managers certainly vary in their style and approach, they tend to be quite clear that it’s their game and they are the leaders of that clubhouse and those players on the field. Leader identity is a strong trait for most managers.

The third indicator is simply the leadership knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) that they develop throughout their lifelong development in baseball (and, theoretically, outside of baseball). These may be social skills, baseball knowledge, strategy development, etc. Arguably, most major league managers have a broad set of these, but they may excel in different KSAs.

Finally, self-awareness is the last of these important developmental indicators. This consists of the extent to which these managers know their strengths and weaknesses and understand where to lead (and how) and where to let others lead.

Here is a story that speaks a bit to this issue of self-awareness: Earl Weaver is one of the all-time great baseball managers who spent his whole career with the Baltimore Orioles, leading them to great heights including the 1970 World Series Championship. Weaver excelled with respect to the first three indicators of leader development, but what about self-awareness? Well, the story goes that Weaver, who was especially hard on his pitchers, was offering advice to them when one of those very successful pitchers, Dave McNally (who won 20 games for four seasons in a row from 1968 through 1971), said “the only thing Earl knows about pitching is that he couldn’t hit it.” (https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/earl-weaver/#sdendnote16sym). Ouch! Self-awareness? I’m not sure Weaver would agree with McNally and perhaps self-awareness is the hole in his leader profile.

After reflecting on what we as I-Os know about the development of leaders related to baseball managers, what can I-Os learn about leadership from baseball managers? Given my Orioles fandom, the fact that Earl Weaver is among the most successful and most interesting managerial characters in baseball history, let’s stick with Weaver. John W. Miller, former global correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, recently published “The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball,” (Avid Reader Press/Simon Schuster, March 2025). Miller’s analysis showed that Weaver had lots of KSAs that served him well (self-awareness may or may not have been among them).

First, Weaver was adamantly open to new ideas. He was the first manager to use the radar gun and he was the first to use it to measure not just pitch speed, but also outfielders’ arms. Second and related to this was his penchant for analytics before any other manager even understood what analytics could do for them. Openness to new ideas and being unafraid of technology were important elements of his success that are certainly important outside the world of baseball.

Third, Miller also made a point that Weaver was really good at focusing on the main things and not being distracted by the many little things that may appear before a manager. This is certainly an important skill for all leaders, and I believe that keeping the main thing the main thing is a paraphrasing of what Steven Covey noted in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” (Free Press, 2004).

Fourth, and this is the most interesting analysis that I found in the book, was that Weaver would push his high performers even harder to get more out of them. Weaver’s perspective was that the gifted and talented like Jim Palmer or Brooks Robinson had more to give, even if they were already performing well. He didn’t push those who were struggling as hard because he didn’t believe they had the talent to really help the team; he took what he could from them but always pushed for more from the Hall of Fame-caliber players. Perhaps there is a lesson here for I-Os but of course pushing too hard can have serious negative effects too.

Finally, it’s interesting to note that Weaver’s teams almost always got better throughout the course of the seasons. They historically started out slowly and then were often the best team in the league in the second half of the season. Perhaps this was due to the focus on fundamentals, conditioning, staying with the program even when things were not going well (what became known as “the Oriole Way” under Weaver and his long-time right-hand person, Cal Ripken Sr.), and strong discipline.

While I-O psychologists typically work in places far away from the world’s baseball fields, I believe there are some lessons to be learned here. Leaders, whether they are baseball managers or CEOs or VPs, need a set of capabilities that will allow them to propel their teams and their organizations toward success, as well as lift them up during challenging seasons. Perhaps consider taking your team to a ball game this summer and see what you glean from what’s happening in the dugout. As Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot by watching.”

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About the Author

Paul Levy, Ph.D, is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Akron and a lifelong fan of the Baltimore Orioles.

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The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology or its affiliates.

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