It’s not enough to simply call Bob Uecker an original, ‘1 of 1’ or the last of his kind.
Uecker was both the OG and the parody, a man whose friendly voice on the airwaves echoed the folksy announcing tropes imbued in baseball for the better part of a century while also, somehow, sending them up.
That he was an even better person only made his death at 90, announced Thursday, an even bigger wound.
Fitting that his last act on the national stage was as the inspirational nucleus of his beloved Milwaukee Brewers, whose stunning exit from the playoffs last season was compounded by the postgame realization that this was probably the last major league game Uecker would see.
Uecker’s family revealed Thursday that he’d been battling small cell lung cancer since 2023, and Brewers veterans such as Christian Yelich could not put on the postgame poker face to conceal the fact Uecker’s time with them was running short.
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It is a stunning tribute to Uecker’s ability to connect that he moved among these young Brewers like an old friend, neither the hood ornament on a franchise nor the entitled sage who demanded the kids these days kiss his ring should he deign to descend to their clubhouse.
No, he was simply Ueck, a classic baseball moniker given the culture’s unstoppable commitment to name contraction. Yet he also ironically and proudly wore the crown “Mr. Baseball,” which served first as a wink and a nod to his .200 batting average – take that, Mario Mendoza! – but then become a fitting label for a man whose most important legacy might be to remind us to never take the game, the industry, life, too seriously.
Now consider this: Uecker solidified his modern image in 1984, when his most epic of many star turns for Miller Lite – “I must be in the front rooooow,” repeated incessantly by children of all ages that summer and forever – first aired.
In 1989, ‘Major League’ hit theaters, and Uecker’s Harry Doyle immortalized him.
Yelich would not be born until 1991.
And yet.
That universal, multi-generational adoration is a tribute to getting what you give. Not many in his industry were as free with his time and love as Uecker, be it time and respect to those following in your humbled footsteps in this game, to chatting up stadium workers and franchise support staff and fellow media like they were all longtime friends – many were.
There’s a shred of irony to the fact a man with such humble origins as a ballplayer would set a standard in broadcasting and, let’s face it, entertainment, that was impossible to replicate.
The 1980s might have been the height of our monoculture, where everyone watched the same three channels, spun Michael Jackson’s Thriller so long that the Billboard charts cried uncle, and knew exactly what you meant when you’d ask, “Where’s the beef?”
Uecker carved out his own significant niche in this cultural jungle, just before it became so overgrown that we struggled to connect with anything.
We’ve all at some point watched a ballgame where a pitcher loses his control and uncorks a pitch so wide of the plate as to be comical. Inevitably, there’d be a mildly awkward silence and the announcer could not help themselves: “Juuuuust a bit outside,” they’d say, with a chuckle and a humble nod to Uecker’s Doyle.
It was an almost immediate acknowledgement from the announcer that they were overmatched, that one could try to descriptively or comically distill how poor that pitch was, but why bother? Uecker had that on lock.
In coming decades, broadcast personalities would gain some form of notoriety by punctuating their highlight narrations with a catchphrase, probably a line from a movie or a bar from a song. Yet these pieces of flair were more like pictures of a picture, at least one degree removed from the real thing.
Uecker made it look so easy to be fresh, and funny, and kind, all at once.
It probably helped that the game humbled him so. Talk to a manager or player about someone going through a struggle at the plate, on the mound or in the field and they’ll inevitably but also fairly note, “The game looks pretty easy from up there.”
But years later, that player or manager might ascend to the broadcast level and forget that very concept, throwing daggers from the booth or carrying on about how terrible the play across the league is, forgetting that Bad Baseball has existed in every era of the game.
Uecker had a birds’ eye view for such a significant swath of it. Of course, he got his national flowers, via Miller Lite and Major League and stints in the broadcast booth for national broadcast networks.
That still can’t take away that he spent 54 years – 54 years! – as the voice or at least a significant one for the Milwaukee Brewers. He never got too big for the game’s smallest market.
That meant an incessant parade of day games after night games, rain delays in the less climate-controlled corners of the Great Lakes and East Coast, and yes, unspeakably bad baseball at times. My first glimpse of this came as a virtual kid, not long out of college and “borrowing” a friend’s credentials for an overwhelmingly insignificant Brewers-A’s clash in 1996.
After batting practice, an elevator popped open and there stood Ueck, satchel in hand, the weight of 40 years in the game and the painful insignificance of Game 66 that year etched on his face.
I was taken aback, having forgotten he was still on the call for the Brewers after so many years as a celebrity. That he’d post for a game between two games going nowhere played before 8,000 fans as surely as he’d be there for the big national broadcast hits.
He sniffed out my vibe and shot a weary look that said, “This is Game 4 of a wraparound series with a 12:15 p.m. start. Don’t ask me about Mr. Belvedere, please.”
Understood.
Certainly, as he advanced in years, his broadcast presence diminished. Yet his enthusiasm never waned, and while that might be viewed as being a “great ambassador for the Brewers and baseball,” it looked from the outside as simply Ueck showing up and being himself.
There’s probably a lesson in that, a commitment both to the grind and to our better selves. Uecker made that look so easy, even as replacing him is simply impossible.
(This story was updated to add a new video.)
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