
Photo by Jeffrey Phelps - Getty Images
Bob Uecker
When Robert George “Bob” Uecker passed away this week, he left us with 75 years of baseball memories that likely will never be surpassed.
In 1956, 22-year-old year old Uecker began playing for one of the Milwaukee Braves’ minor league teams. Five years later, the dependable catcher went to The Show, something every minor leaguer dreams about. Uecker made his first major league appearance on April 13, 1962 as a third-string catcher with the Milwaukee Braves. Working behind Joe Torre and Del Crandall, Uecker’s tenure with the Braves. He was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals in 1964 where he spent most of the season on the bench. But riding the pine on a team like the Cards has its advantages and he earned a coveted World Series ring that year.
Referring to his season with the Philadelphia Phillies, years later Uecker wryly said, “I knew when my career was over. In 1965, my baseball card came out without a photo!” Actually, he wasn’t far off the mark. Uecker’s short, unmemorable major league career ended in 1967 with the Atlanta Braves.
With his deep, resonant voice and razor-sharp sense of humor, Uecker was a natural to call baseball games and in 1971 he became the Milwaukee Brewers’ radio announcer, a position he held for the next 54 years. Uecker quickly became more well-known than most of the players on the team and talk show Johnny Carson dubbed him “Mr. Baseball.” Ultimately, Uecker made more than 100 appearances on the Tonight Show. Along with pushing Miller Lite into becoming one of the best-selling beers in the nation, he starred in a television series and appeared as himself in the Major League film and its two sequels.
A big part of his charm was the endless stream of self-deprecating stories about a less-than-stellar career. “The best way to catch a Phil Niekro knuckleball was to wait until it stopped rolling and pick it up”, he once said. Despite a lifetime of fame and all his enviable accomplishments, Bob Uecker was likely most proud of the path a .200 career hitter took to be enshrined in Cooperstown’s legendary Baseball Hall of Fame.
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