Whether it was attempting to shag fly balls during batting practice with a purloined tuba or holding hands with a teammate on photo day, there wasn’t much Bob Uecker wouldn’t do to try and get a laugh.
Uecker, a one-time catcher in Major League Baseball who incorporated his self-deprecating humor into a career as a broadcaster for his hometown Milwaukee Brewers and occasionally dipping a toe in the waters of acting, passed away on Thursday at the age of 90, the Brewers announced.
A native of the Milwaukee area, Uecker signed with the Braves, who called that city home from 1954 to 1966, as a 20-year-old just out of the army, making stops in eight minor league cities before making his MLB debut with the Braves in 1962. He’d spent part of the following year in Denver but stayed in the majors full-time from 1964-67, winning a World Series with the Cardinals in 1964 – and before game two of that series came the tuba stunt.
“They had some Dixieland bands on the field that were playing before the game,” Uecker recalled in a 2017 article on MLB.com, “and while one of them was taking a break, I grabbed one of the tubas and put it on and went out in the outfield and started shagging fly balls with it. I didn’t catch them all. Some made dents in the tuba, but I caught a couple.”
Earlier that year—the same year President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act—Uecker and Bob Gibson subtly held hands in the front row of the Cardinals’ team photo and were fined for it.
Gibson, the surly pitcher who would’ve thrown at his own mother if she were crowding the plate, has his head cocked to the side with an ear-to-ear grin, and Uecker, ever the jester, is smiling too.
In fact, they’re the only two Cardinals in the photo smiling.
When Allan H. Selig bought the Seattle Pilots out of bankruptcy and moved the club to Milwaukee, Uecker was hired as a scout before moving to the team’s radio booth, where he remained a fixture until his death.
At the team, local broadcasters in the Major Leagues were generally local celebrities, not national ones, but his self-deprecating humor and one-liners got him guest appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, roles in a series of commercials for Miller Lite, and eventually, a starring role in the sitcom “Mr. Belvidere” and the “Major League” movie franchise.
When I was growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, Uecker became better known around the country for his quips as Cleveland broadcaster Harry Doyle in the “Major League” movies than for his modest MLB career as a player or his ubiquitous presence on Brewers radio.
The truth is, Bob Uecker, nicknamed “Mr. Baseball” by Carson, was so good as a broadcaster and humorist that ultimately, looking back, it’s hard to say where Uecker began, and Harry Doyle ended.
“Hello again everybody, Harry Doyle here welcoming all you friends of the feather to another season of Indians baseball,” he intones as the organ plays. The home game scenes in the original Major League were filmed at Milwaukee’s County Stadium, home ballpark of the Brewers and Braves. He pours Jack Daniel’s into a cup, wipes the rim of the bottle with a finger and, swabs his earlobe, and continues, “A lot of new faces in Chief Wahoo’s tribe this year as they take on the defending American League champions, the New York Yankees. And hopefully, we’ll have the names that go with some of those faces before their first at-bat. Anyhow, listen to the roar of the crowd as the Indians take the field!”
The sparsely filled stands erupt in mild, meek cheering.
In another scene, told he can’t say a curse word on the air by his color commentator, he replies, “Don’t worry, no one’s listening anyway!”
Speaking about himself, he once joked that he won the Minor League Player of the Year award, with a punchline of, “The problem was, I had already been in the Majors for three years!”
And while he was a cut-up on screen and on the radio, Uecker loved the game, and unlike most of his contemporaries, whether the were players or media, he loved it enough to never take it too seriously, always bringing humor to a sport that, far too frequently, takes itself too seriously.
When the Brewers won the National League Central in 2018, Uecker went down to the Brewers clubhouse, where the then-83-year-old former catcher joined in the celebration, getting doused with beer and champagne by the team.
Bob Uecker proving: kings stay kings. pic.twitter.com/BwKuDoaf1f
— MLB GIFS (@MLBGIFs) September 27, 2018
“I enjoy the broadcast every day, but I think my friendship with these guys, they treat me like I’m a player,” told MLB.com afterward. “That’s the thing, where I can come in and they can break my chops and they know I’m part of it, and that’s the one thing, no matter how old you get, they make you young, they keep you young.”
Uecker stayed young until the very end, loving baseball with the enthusiasm of a Little Leaguer despite having spent nearly six decades in the pro game, never pulling punches but rather, pushing punchlines, and we – players, broadcasters, writers and fans alike – all loved him for it.
