Catching Up With Former Brewers Announcer Joe Block

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Joe Block

Welcome to the On Deck Circle, Brewers writer Kyle Lobner's weekly preview of the team's week to come and beyond.

A 162-game MLB schedule creates some weird anomalies sometimes, and this week’s upcoming Pirates series is a perfect example.

As part of MLB’s unbalanced schedule, the Brewers spend a lot of time playing their NL Central rivals. All told, about 47% of their season is made up of games against either the Cubs, Reds, Cardinals or Pirates. That’s what makes it so unusual that the Brewers would have played 90 games and have yet to host a single game against Pittsburgh.

In fact, the Brewers and Pirates haven’t seen each other at all since April 17, when the two teams wrapped up a three-game set at PNC Park. Their 16 meetings between now and October represent about 22% of Milwaukee’s remaining regular season schedule.

That odd schedule means we still haven’t had a chance to see our old friend and new Pirates broadcaster Joe Block in Milwaukee this season, and won’t until the end of next week. Block was a little busy on Sunday with Pittsburgh’s 2-1, 18 inning victory over the Nationals (the longest regular season game in Nationals franchise history and the longest National League game since July of 2015), but was still kind enough to take a few moments to discuss his new life in Pittsburgh, his first season as a new father to soon-to-be eight-month-old daughter Nancy and the season to date for the 2016 Pirates.

So, after four seasons in Milwaukee, how’s life in Pittsburgh?

Everything is going fantastic here. I work with really great people here, too. Obviously the major lure at first, prior to knowing what a good organization the Pirates and the camaraderie I’ve grown to share with the other broadcasters, my bosses and the people with which I work, the family draw was the number one thing that we were looking at because my wife grew up in the Pittsburgh area. So that has been even better than expected, both personally and professionally.

But I always, especially when something’s going to be written that will be read in Wisconsin, I want people to know that the enjoyment and satisfaction that I’m having now is mutually exclusive from the enjoyment and satisfaction I had in Wisconsin too. It was my wife and I’s first home after being married, and we’ve shared so many memories there just loving the state and living on the East Side of Milwaukee. In fact, we’ve planned a trip surrounding the Pirates’ first visit to Miller Park coming up in a couple of weeks. My wife and daughter will make their first trips, so Nancy’s first baseball game is probably going to be at Miller Park, not PNC Park. She hasn’t come to one yet.

So we really enjoyed that time. And obviously professionally, everyone I worked with was true class and pros but obviously Ueck [Bob Uecker] was a priceless experience to be able to be around him. He and I grew to be very close, and our wives did too, which is something that in this business does not always happen that people are forced to work together, so to speak, end up really genuinely liking each other and becoming good friends. And I obviously, as everyone else does, have so much respect for him as an entertainer, as a broadcaster but also as a man, as a person.

So it was such a great four years and I learned so much in such a short period of time that it felt like I was prepared for this challenge, doing nine every night, doing radio and TV, and kind of establishing my own identity at the major league level. And I owe so much of it to Ueck and the other people around in Milwaukee that helped me grow.

Overall, it’s great, and it was great.

What’s your first season been like as a new father?

Really cool. There’s time for being a father, and there’s time for being a baseball broadcaster during the baseball season, and not much else. And that’s fine because those are really the only two things I think I can be any good at. [Laughs] As for the father part, I’m learning, as all new fathers are, but she’s happy and healthy. We love playing with her and teaching her, and she teaches us now a little bit. So it’s a really cool thing to see someone grow. I’ve never experienced a kind of love like that. Being a dad is the greatest decision I made in my life.

To be able to do that now, with family support, Nancy gets to interact with her grandparents, her great grandparents, all of her great aunts and uncles, her cousins, her aunt and soon-to-be uncle, all of that on a daily basis, it’s something that you can’t just recreate. So we’re just so lucky to be able to have that for her. And now it’s quickly gone from being what is best for me and what’s best for my wife to what’s best for her. So it’s really cool to be able to be a dad and try to make as much time as I can around baseball for her.

Jumping over to the baseball side: The Pirates start the day Monday at 47-45, two and a half games back of the National League’s final Wild Card spot and eight and a half games back of the Cubs in the NL Central. What’s it going to take for this team to make the playoffs?

Their starting pitching has got to be consistent. The current run has not been great, although today [Sunday] was. But for starting pitching, you need consistency in terms of innings and quality starts, whether you want to use the stat [six innings, three or fewer earned runs] or just the loose definition of it, that’s what separates the great teams and the also rans. And you don’t have to have fantastic starting pitching, you can look at what the Royals have done and still won it all, but you have to be able to have four guys or so out there that you can trot out and trust and the Pirates have struggled to find that quartet that could give you six innings and two or three runs a night and keep your club in the ballgame. They just have not had that with any consistency, probably besides Gerrit Cole and he’s just returning from injury.

The other guys, there’s really intriguing young pitchers that either are up or on the cusp of being up to stay. They’re going to probably have to help out because some of the veterans that either have been held over or brought in to hold the fort really haven’t very often. So we’ll see, but as we know in baseball, things can change in a jiffy. If these guys start pitching better the improvement can come from within. But the Pirates, on the heels of the trade deadline, may look externally to improve that starting staff because the bullpen’s been much improved lately, the hitting will be stable all year, it’s a great group of hitters. This spell coming up right now is going to be big: If they play good baseball they should win some games. And right now they’ve got to, because they’re on the outside looking in at the moment.

As of Monday morning the non-waiver trade deadline is 13 days away. Is there any indication whether the Pirates are planning on being buyers at the deadline?

Yeah, absolutely. [Pirates general manager] Neal Huntington has suggested so, maybe a month ago, and that was when the Pirates were under .500. So the plan is to look and see what’s possible. He said it today: The biggest acquisitions they’re probably going to make are Gerrit Cole coming back off the DL, which just happened, and Francisco Cervelli coming off the DL, which may happen in time for the Brewers series, and Andrew McCutchen returning to form.

So I don’t anticipate the Pirates going out and being in on the top guys in the trade market. I won’t rule them out, but I don’t think that’s likely. However, the Pirates do have some holdover guys, veteran players that could be of use to other contending teams, at positions where they have some young guys that they may want to test out in the second half of the season. So you could even see the Pirates be buyers and sellers, coming up in the final two weeks until the deadline to kind of get their club configured in the way that they hope can be most effective in the final two and a half months but also for the years ahead.

So I’m curious to see what’s going to be done. I don’t think the Pirates will be major buyers or major sellers, but they’re definitely going to try to go for it and put the best team possible on the field here to try to make the postseason.

So the last thing I have for you here is a question you probably hear every day and you’re probably sick of it by now, but Andrew McCutchen…

Oh, I thought you were going to ask what it’s like to work with Bob Uecker. [Laughs] I get that one a lot. And the answer’s the same: It’s great. He’s great. I won’t elaborate. I’m sorry, go ahead.

I was going to ask you about Andrew McCutchen. It seemed like, at least statistically, he had turned the corner a bit the last couple of weeks before a really awful day today (the first 0-for-8 day in the National League since 2013). What are you seeing with him, day-to-day? Is he on the cusp of being back to being the player he’s been, or is there something bigger here?

I see incremental improvement. There’s no injury. Sometimes hitters lose their way for a while. It’s been hard for everyone to put a finger on. I do think there’s been incremental improvement lately, and you pointed out that five-game hitting streak, but in his body language, it’s improved maybe in the last week or week and a half.

There have been some times defensively where there have been lapses. Not because of effort, but it just doesn’t look like the same player out there sometimes. Then you see something special, the gears are turning, the wheels kick in a little bit more. Today he cut off a ball and limited a guy to a single. In the first two at bats today there were an eight-pitch and a nine-pitch at bat. Those were really good at bats. Yesterday his two singles were both to right field. But then again today, we saw a 93 mile per hour center cut fastball that he swung right through. You just don’t see McCutchen do that when he’s at his best.

Of course, I didn’t see him every day, but I did get to see him 75 times or whatever over four years (during Block’s time with Milwaukee) and had an idea what a special player he is.  So there’s been moments in there when he doesn’t look right, but there have been a lot lately where you see that glimmer of old ‘Cutch, and you know it’s there.

I don’t think there’s any loss of hand strength or bat speed. He’s just missing some pitches. And I don’t know enough about hitting to pinpoint why. Those who do, I’m sure suggest some things to him. But when you get this far into a season and you’ve enjoyed so much success in your career and it’s not coming, I’m sure it gets in your mind. At some point if he can just clear his mind and have some success, and he’s having some incremental success lately, maybe that will just click and he’ll have one of his .400 months that we’ve seen. It’s been the great mystery. But if he gets it going, the Pirates are going to be really tough to stop.