Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Bob Uecker, the club shortstop who turned his story of greatness as a major league catcher into a moving comic, died Thursday at his home in Menomonee Falls, Wis. his second career as a sportsman and sportsman.
His family announced his death in a statement released by the Milwaukee Brewers, a longtime broadcaster. The statement said that he had been undergoing treatment for small lung cancer since early 2023.
Uecker proved himself to be no exception during his six seasons as a major leaguer in the 1960s. He hit just .197, hit 14 home runs and drove in 74 runs. .A career reliever, he never started more than 62 games in a season for the Milwaukee Braves, St. Louis Cardinals or Philadelphia Phillies.
“To last as long as I can, with the skills I have, is a triumph of the human spirit,” Uecker said in his memoir, “Catcher in the Wry” (1982), written with Mickey Herskowitz.
He told self-deprecating stories – some true, some not – as if he only played baseball to gather material for a comedy routine.
“One time I was named the minor league player of the year,” he said. “Unfortunately, I was in the majors for two years at the time..”
Meanwhile, idle time on the bench and in the window gave Uecker a deep knowledge of baseball. This was evident during his broadcasts for the Brewers, which he began in 1971 as the play-by-play voice and continued through last season.
Uecker admitted that the close game didn’t require his skill set, but the explosion demanded it.
“If we’re not doing well, you’ve got to do something to keep people listening,” he told MLB Network in 2015. At the time, he added, “We talked about nose hair. “I’m Pete Vuckovich every day here,” says the longtime Milwaukee pitcher.
.
Uecker is a Milwaukee icon — “the light of the Brewers” and “the laughter in our hearts,” the team said in a statement — and he’s become a national icon in the history-making cycle. image in a popular advertising campaign for Miller Lite beer in the 1980s, and for his role as Harry Doyle, the voice of former Cleveland Indians, in the comedy film “Major League” (1989).
The Miller Lite campaign, built on the debate over whether the low-calorie beer is tasty or not, featured several sports celebrities.
In the most famous ad, Uecker walks on a cardboard chair to a ballpark. But when a host interrupted him to say he was in the wrong place, Uecker replied, “Oh, I’ve got to be in the front row!” He was led to a chair in a far area of the stadium.
“Nice seat, eh, mate?” He shouted in the middle of a sea of chairs.
Seeing Uecker sitting in the distance has become such a part of his image that in 2014, a statue of Uecker was placed on the far side of Milwaukee’s Miller Park.
Remarkably, this is the second statue of Uecker to be placed in the ballpark. Two years earlier, the Brewers had unveiled a shroud in the outfield, next to that of Hall of Fame players Henry Aaron and Robin Yount.
“If you listen closely, you can hear the statue of Henry begging to be moved,” said sportscaster Bob Costas, a friend and colleague of Uecker’s, during the dedication.
Robert George Uecker was born in Milwaukee on January 26, 1934. His father, August, a Swiss immigrant, was a hardware and die maker, and his mother, Mary (Schultz) Uecker, was a homemaker. The Ueckers lived near Borchert Field, the former home of the Brewers’ team. Young Bob and his friends often sneaked in to watch games.
One of Uecker’s regular jokes was about his father’s reaction to the Braves’ offer to sign him for $3,000.
“We were a poor family and, of course, he didn’t have that kind of money,” Uecker said. “Finally he scraped it off and told me to leave the house again.”
Uecker hit with power and average in the Braves’ minor league system. Before the 1961 season he thought he had made the Braves’ big league roster, but the manager, Chuck Dressen, sent him down to Louisville’s minor league team with a warning.
“There’s no place in baseball for clowns,” Uecker recalled Dressen telling him.
But apparently it was. He joined the Braves in 1962 but played sparingly, as he did again in 1963, spending part of the season in the minor leagues.
He was traded to the Cardinals in 1964, to the Phillies in 1965 and back to the Braves (who moved to Atlanta) in 1967. In a less than proud career, he he was most proud that the two home runs he hit in 1965 were against future Hall of Fame pitchers Sandy Koufax and Gaylord Perry.
“Perry said it was the worst day of his life,” Uecker told MLB Network, feigning surprise. “It’s not just his baseball life. His whole life.”
Uecker said a Cardinals trainer injected him with the hepatitis virus to keep him from playing in the 1964 World Series, in which the Cardinals defeated the Yankees in seven games. He was on the team’s roster but didn’t pitch in any of those games — the starting catcher, Tim McCarver, played every inning, hitting .478.
But these failures are understandable. Most of those missed pitches were knuckle balls thrown by Braves’ Phil Niekro. For Niekro, 1967 was a breakout season, and he later credited Uecker with encouraging him to throw nothing but the knuckler.
“Ueck told me if I wanted to be a hitter, throw the knuckleball every time, and he would try to catch it,” Niekro told The Oklahoman in 1988.
Uecker’s experience with Niekro’s tricky pitch inspired one of his most frequently quoted lines.
“The way to catch a knuckleball,” he said, “is to wait until it stops rolling and then catch it.”
Uecker’s playing days ended mercifully when the Braves released him in 1968, after hitting .146 the previous season.
He didn’t back down into the intense darkness that was planned. He worked for the Braves on the organization’s speaker’s bureau and in television broadcasting. His natural sense of humor and boisterous nature made him a popular guest speaker, which led to a friendship with trumpeter Al Hirt, who booked him at his Atlanta nightclub on in 1969.
Hirt then helped Uecker land on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” where Carson made dozens of appearances screaming at Uecker’s dead ends.
After his first appearance on the show, Uecker recalls that Carson and his co-host Ed McMahon expressed doubts about the veracity of his baseball story.
“I walked over and I heard Johnny say to Ed, ‘Did that guy really play baseball?'” Uecker said in a 2016 interview on “Feherty,” the series. story by Golf Channel golf analyst David Feherty. “And Ed said, ‘I think so.’ They didn’t believe I was playing football.”
His broadcasting career began with a stint with the Brewers. He was hired by Bud Selig, the team’s owner and future commissioner of Major League Baseball, as a scout. But Selig called Uecker the “worst scout I ever had,” especially for turning the first report of the scout covered in mashed potatoes and gravy from his dinner.
In addition to calling Brewers games for 54 years, Uecker worked as an analyst for ABC Sports in 1976 for the “Monday Night Baseball” franchise, where he remained until 1982. One night, during a game one where he was called with Al Michaels and Howard Cosell , Uecker corrected Cosell on a strategic point that was obviously wrong.
“Uecky, I get your point,” Cosell said, according to Michaels’ autobiography. “But you don’t have to be so treculent. You know what truculent means, right?
The witty Uecker replied, “Of course, Howard. If you have a truck and I borrowed it, it’s a truck you borrowed.
Uecker returned to the network in the 1990s for NBC, but he kept his job with the Brewers.
As Harry Doyle in “Major League”, which starred Charlie Sheen and Tom Berenger as a player in the fictional version of the Cleveland Indians, Uecker played, regardless of the extension of himself. He deleted all his lines, including the most famous ones.
When Sheen’s character throws several feet out of the strike zone, Doyle says, “Juuuuuuuust out there,” adding, in addition, “Tried the corner and failed.”
It wasn’t Doyle’s most offensive line, but it became synonymous with the wrong pitch thrown by Little Leaguers and big leaguers alike. Uecker reprized the “Major League” character in 1994 and 1998.
Uecker also played sportswriter George Owens on “Mr. Belvedere,” a sitcom about a British butler who works for an American family, which aired on ABC from 1985 to the 1990s.
When Uecker accepted the Ford C. Frick Award for Outstanding Broadcaster from the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2003, he had one regret.
“I still — and this is not sour grapes by any means — think I should be a player,” he said, as the Hall of Famers sitting behind him laughed.
He was also inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame for his two appearances as announcer at Wrestlemania events in the late 1980s. In one, in 1988, he was briefly chokeslammed by André the Giant Uecker, who took offense when Uecker called his big hand a foot.
Uecker is survived by his longtime friend, Judy Uecker, with whom he was divorced but reunited; his daughter, Sue Uecker; a son, Bob Jr.; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Another son, Steve, died in 2012 of complications from San Joaquin Valley fever; Another daughter, Leann Uecker Ziemer, died of ALS in 2022. His marriage to Joyce Jahn ended in divorce.
Although Uecker did not play in the 1964 World Series, he still had some memorable moments on the field. Before Game 2 at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, he picked up a tuba that sat on the patio while a marching band took a break.
“I put it on and went out there and started swinging fly balls with it,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1995. “I couldn’t catch them all. Some speared the tuba, but I caught a couple.”
His antics did not please the Cardinal. The team deducted $260 for tuba damage from the $8,622 World Series winner’s check.
