In the sport he adored, he was Mr. Baseball. In pop culture, he was the humorous broadcaster from the movie “Major League”, an iconic pitchman for Miller Lite commercials, a frequent guest on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” and an actor on the sitcom “Mr. Belvedere.” In Milwaukee, he was just Ueck.
To refer to Bob Uecker simply as the voice of the Milwaukee Brewers would tell only a fraction of his impact. He was also its heart and soul.
Uecker, who died Thursday at 90, spent 53 years doing what he loved most, which was to call Brewers games on the radio. Uecker was so good as a radio broadcaster, with his special comedic style and quick wit, the Baseball Hall of Fame honored him in 2003 with the Ford C. Frick Award. It’s one of several halls of fame honoring him, from Wisconsin’s to the WWE’s, a reminder of his wide-ranging ability to elicit smiles and laughter. No matter how bright a star he became outside of his sport and the city he called home, for the entirety of the franchise’s existence — 54 years — Uecker had been synonymous with Milwaukee Brewers baseball.
We are heartbroken to announce that Brewers icon & Baseball Hall of Famer Bob Uecker passed away today at the age of 90 pic.twitter.com/EJRBC8Cjj4
— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) January 16, 2025
Uecker was born Jan. 26, 1934, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His parents, Gus and Sue Uecker, were Swiss immigrants who came to Wisconsin in the 1920s. Gus was a tool and die maker who played soccer in his native Switzerland. Uecker once said, “That’s where I got my talent.” Growing up, Uecker was actually a pitcher. He didn’t finish high school and in 1954, at the age of 20, he enlisted in the Army. He hoped to avoid going overseas by playing military baseball with soldiers who had played in the minors or in college. Since, Uecker hadn’t yet done either, he lied. According to a USA Today article in 1997, he said he had played at Marquette, given that it was a college in his native Milwaukee. “Marquette didn’t have a team, but they never checked,” he said. After his time in the service, Uecker became the first Milwaukee native to sign with the Braves.
“You know, I signed with the Milwaukee Braves for $3,000,” Uecker once said. “That bothered my dad at the time because he didn’t have that kind of dough to pay out. But eventually, he scraped it up.”
Uecker, always ready for a self-deprecating joke, never let anyone forget that it all started with his undistinguished playing career. Uecker’s six seasons as a backup catcher, starting in 1962 with the Milwaukee Braves, and his .200 lifetime batting average supplied plenty of fodder and a decades-long schtick.
Brewers manager Pat Murphy celebrates the team’s NL Central title with Uecker in September 2024. (Larry Radloff/Icon Sportswire)
“Career highlights?” Uecker once said. “I had two. I got an intentional walk from Sandy Koufax, and I got out of a rundown against the Mets.”
On being intentionally walked by Koufax, he joked, “I was pretty proud of that until I heard that the commissioner wrote Koufax a letter telling him the next time something like that happened, he’d be fined for damaging the image of the game.”
Actually, there were more highlights than just that. Of Uecker’s 14 career home runs, three were off future Hall of Famers: Koufax, Fergie Jenkins and Gaylord Perry.
But, of course, that only created more jokes.
“I hit a homer off Sandy Koufax,” Uecker once said. “Each time I see him, I apologize. I was worried that it’d keep him out of the Hall of Fame.”
As with any great storyteller, it was always hard to tell with Ueck when the truth stopped and the embellishing began. But that was all part of the fun. Even the origin story of how Uecker started calling Brewers games is a blast.
While he was the Brewers owner, Bud Selig, the future baseball commissioner, hired Uecker at the annual BBWAA meeting in New York in 1971. Uecker was only four years removed from his final season as a player. Originally, Selig hired Uecker as a scout. “The worst scout in baseball history,” Selig said in September 2021 at an event celebrating Uecker’s 50 years with the club. Selig made the comment in a deadpan that Uecker would admire. Selig always swore he once received a scouting report in the mail from Uecker that was smeared with mashed potatoes and gravy. Suffice it to say, the scouting enterprise for Uecker didn’t work out, and given how things unfolded since, it was for the better.
Said Selig, more seriously, “My instinct told me he could be a hell of an announcer.”
That he was. Uecker was named Wisconsin Sportscaster of the Year five times by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association. Those around the Brewers and close to Uecker believed he always viewed himself as a player. Even the friends he never met, those who knew him only from his voice on the radio, could tell.
Of his broadcasting style, Uecker once said he adopted it from his playing days when he would use quick phrases — like “Get up, get up!” — in the dugout while commenting on home runs or big plays. His entertaining style was one thing, but Uecker, his radio colleagues always said, was worth studying because of his “feel” for the game and how he knew when to let the game breathe and speak for itself.
“Bob, he’s an amazing comedian, and that we all know,” said former radio partner Cory Provus, now with the Twins. “But, man, he calls a great game.”
Said former radio partner Pat Hughes, now the voice of the Cubs: “I really noticed the way he would listen to people say anything or do anything, and immediately have his own fresh take on what he just heard or what he just saw, and it’s just a gift that he has that I’ve never seen anyone else really possess the way he has it.”
And Brewers radio broadcaster Lane Grindle once put it most succinctly, saying, “He’s unbelievably gifted as a play-by-play guy … The reason he’s in the Hall of Fame is because he can call a damn good game.”
Uecker’s “broadcasting tree” is proof of that. In addition to Hughes and Provus, there’s Jim Powell (previously with the Braves) and Joe Block (now with the Pirates). Grindle and Brewers radio broadcaster Jeff Levering said they never stopped learning from Uecker. Most of all, they also never stopped having fun because of Uecker.
Players, coaches and anyone affiliated with the Brewers tended to gravitate to Uecker for the same reasons. Longtime close friend Tony Migliaccio, who started as a Brewers bat boy in 1978 and is now their director of clubhouse operation, once put it best when he said Uecker had an ability to connect with anyone and everyone. Uecker was a fixture in Brewers clubhouses, as much a part of the fabric as the clubhouse attendant or bench coach. Only perhaps more. It’s hard to imagine another broadcaster who was more a part of their team.
Therefore it came as no surprise when, upon clinching the National League Central in 2021, the Brewers refused to take a team photo until Uecker joined. So there was Uecker, with confetti falling over his dress shirt that was already soaked in Miller Lites from a clubhouse celebration, emerging from the dugout to take part in an on-field celebration with men more than 50 years younger than him.
“He’s a huge part of this,” Christian Yelich said at the time. “I think everybody always looks forward to this lawnmower celebration and the champagne showers.”
Some things never changed.
“He was always accepted as a player,” Robin Yount said in September 2021 at a ceremony honoring Uecker’s career with the Brewers. “He might as well have been a player.”
For a period of time, Uecker even threw batting practice, often wearing a No. 1 jersey. Yount said Uecker was “probably the best batting practice pitcher we had for many years.” Not bad for an athlete who once joked, “When I came up to bat with three men on and two outs in the ninth, I looked in the other team’s dugout and they were already in street clothes.”
Eventually, and although he remained in tremendous shape (there’s a Sports Illustrated cover to prove it. Uecker often referred to as his “swimsuit issue”), Uecker eventually stopped throwing batting practice, but always remained of utmost influence and importance. Uecker and Allan “Bud” Selig had a wonderful friendship, with Uecker known as the only one who could get away with calling Selig, “Al.” When Mark Attanasio bought the team in 2005, his first call was to Uecker. Or at least, that was the plan. Several years ago, Attanasio told the entertaining story of how Uecker at first didn’t return the calls.
“I even called Robin Yount to see if he could help,” Attanasio said. “Wendy (Selig-Prieb) implored him to call me. Finally, Bob said he’d spend 15 minutes with me. To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart in ‘Casablanca,’ it was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”
The fun story was a reminder of what remained most important to Uecker: His time with the Brewers.
“Bob became incredibly popular, incredibly recognizable,” said Paul Molitor in September 2021. “But his favorite environment was always the clubhouse. Or the radio booth. He never changed.”
If Uecker wasn’t already a household name by 1989, his role in the comedy movie Major League certainly made him one. Uecker played team broadcaster, Harry Doyle. His iconic line — “Juuuuuust a bit outside” — described a wild pitch, is recited everywhere as an iconic part of baseball popular culture.
Even during his time with Carson, Uecker used material from baseball.
In one funny exchange Uecker, said: “I made a major contribution to Cardinals’ pennant drive. I came down with hepatitis.”
Carson replied: “How’d you catch it?”
Uecker said: “The trainer injected me with it.”
At some point at the height of his popularity, Uecker was once even courted by George Steinbrenner and the Yankees. Uecker passed. He stayed with the Brewers.
“With everything that came his way,” Molitor said, “he never forgot his roots, and I think we all saw that.”
Molitor made those comments at the same ceremony Yount attended. How much did Uecker mean to Wisconsin? In addition to the Hall of Fame ballplayers, and Selig, both the state governor Tony Evers and the mayor of Milwaukee Tom Barrett also attended the event.
Reminders of Uecker will remain all over American Family Field. In 2005, Uecker’s 50th year in professional baseball, the Brewers placed a No. 50 for him in their “Ring of Honor,” near the retired numbers of Yount and Molitor. Four years later, on May 12, 2009, Uecker’s name was also added to the Braves Wall of Honor inside Miller Park. Behind the last row of section 422 in the upper deck is where the Brewers playfully dedicated a statue of Uecker in 2014. It was a nod to the Miller Lite “All Stars” ads of the 1970s and ’80s in which Uecker would proclaim, “I must be in the front row!” only to get sent to the cheap seats. To this day, some people refer to the nosebleeds near the top of the stadium as “Uecker seats.” And Atop Bernie’s famous home run slide, there is a sign with Uecker’s famed home run call: “Get up! Get up! Get outta here! Gone!”
In Milwaukee, Uecker will never really be too far. That’s just how he always wanted it.
“With everything he has done in his life — the movies, the stand-up, the commercials — everything was around the Brewers,” Levering said. “He made sure of it. Nobody will ever be like him ever again.”
(Top photo of Uecker in 2008: Ben Smidt/Pool-Getty Images)
