“You have to see this guy. He’s hilarious.”
The year is fuzzy, but it has to be pre-“Mr. Belvedere,” which debuted in 1985. It was before the Miller Lite commercials that started running in 1983, or maybe it was after they aired, but before they became a cultural touchstone. It could have been one of 100 “Tonight Show” appearances, but it’s hard to imagine hanging out with my dad past 9 p.m. on a weeknight. It must have been a local show, a tape-delayed interview, a game show, something. All I remember is my dad drawing my attention to the man on the TV.
“He was a baseball player, but he was really bad, and now he makes fun of himself. He’s the best.”
It had to have been a very small window, somewhere between the start of my baseball fanaticism and the point where anyone with a TV, even a 6-year-old boy, would have recognized Bob Uecker. My dad didn’t introduce him as the longtime play-by-play announcer of the Brewers, which would have been a much better explanation for why a gray-haired ex-player was on our television. All I knew was that there was a retired player who was so bad at baseball, he could have a career decades after he retired, joking about his lack of talent.
So I watched and laughed along with my dad, as my brain worked in real time to rewire what my expectations of a baseball star could be. I already had boxes of baseball cards, so I was familiar with a lot of players, and I knew all the ways they could become stars. They could be the fastest (Rickey Henderson) or the strongest (Jack Clark). They could throw the hardest (Nolan Ryan) or have the most impressive mustache (Rollie Fingers). But the funniest? Even if they were awful?
It wasn’t long before my friends were running around the schoolyard screaming, “He missed the tag! He missed the tag!” and everyone, baseball nut or not, was very aware of Uecker and his sense of humor. My introduction to him is a core memory, though, hand to heart. I remember the lighting in the room, the orientation of the TV, how smitten my dad was. It would be incorrect and overly cute to draw a straight line from that moment to my eventual career as a baseball writer who peppers his writing with stupid jokes, but it’s entirely accurate to suggest that was the first time that I realized that baseball could be funny. It was an introduction to the stupidity of baseball, something that’s absolutely sacred to the sport.
Baseball is a beautiful sport. It’s an elegant sport. It’s a sport that pays off like a slot machine, where you can put in coin after coin without much happening, but you’re guaranteed an eventual jackpot of tension and excitement. But it’s also a very silly sport, no way around it. It’s a sport where you watch grown men in pajamas fail, over and over again. Sometimes an older man will waddle out to the field, and he’ll also be wearing pajamas for some reason. It can be the least important thing in the world and the most important thing in the world at the same time, a quantum superposition we take for granted.
Uecker was a baseball icon and pop culture figure because of all of the above. His persona fit the Harry Doyle character in “Major League” perfectly, but not just because he could sell the line “juuuuuust a bit outside” and turn it into something that’s still referenced a million times every baseball season. That character worked because his arc was similar to one that every baseball fan could identify with, from frustration to dismissiveness to renewed interest to celebration to elation. When Doyle celebrates Cleveland’s pennant (spoiler), he’s earned that celebration, and you’ve watched him build up to that progressive jackpot. The sport wasn’t serious until it was. Baseball’s just a game until it isn’t.
This was the void that Uecker filled, the part about baseball that was always there in the background, but hadn’t been put into words or personified like it needed to be. Baseball stars were supposed to be demigods, like Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle, with unfathomable talents that were beyond anything anyone had ever seen. You couldn’t relate to them, but that was the point. That’s what baseball is supposed to be.
When Uecker was booted from the good seats and sent to the cheap seats in that Miller Lite commercial, though, it was a more relatable part of the baseball experience. And when he’s screaming about a missed tag, he’s caring so much that he stops being a normal, polite member of a civilized society and starts yelling at someone who will never hear him. And you’d better believe that’s also what baseball is supposed to be. Heck, it goes deeper than just the sport, but baseball is one of those things that helps us process it all. All of us are in the third deck of the universe, somehow all alone and a part of a crowd at the same time, pointing and screaming at something that’s roughly as important as a play in the sixth inning of a regular-season Brewers game.
Uecker’s ability to embody this contradiction made him perfect for all sorts of roles, not just baseball. It allowed him to be the avatar of an everyman on a sitcom, dealing with sitcom problems that the everyman watching could relate to.
It’s why he was perfect as announcer for Wrestlemania, and not just any Wrestlemania, but the one where Andre the Giant wrestled Hulk Hogan. There were two other cultural icons, with the literal giant dressed in a leotard and the other one rocking a golden skullet and handlebar mustache, and they were going to hug each other and throw each other and fake punch each other because the script told them to. Completely absurd and frivolous. It shouldn’t mean anything. It’s still something that I sought out on YouTube last year, though, even though I stopped following professional wrestling in the 1980s. It’s a fine line between utterly unimportant and eternally worthwhile, and don’t you forget it.
This is why Uecker’s nickname — Mr. Baseball — is one of the best in the history of the sport. It’s a sport of successes and failures, with more failures than any professional sport. It’s a sport that should make you laugh. It’s a sport that should make you care. It’s a sport that isn’t just populated by superstars, but requires a foundation of less-thans and also-rans, guys who can grow up and succeed enough to play for their hometown team, but not have the talent to become a regular, much less a superstar. It’s a sport that kids play every day, and some of the worst players are the ones who fall in love the hardest.
Maybe the best way to explain it all is to look at the last game that Uecker played in the majors, in 1967. In the first inning, Bob Gibson took the mound, and he was one of those demigods, a magician with the baseball and an ornery, all-business personality that radiated into the crowd and through the TV, radio or newspaper. In the first inning, Gibson had to face Henry Aaron, another demigod and one of the greatest to ever play, with two runners on and nobody out. He struck him out looking.
Orlando Cepeda led off the next inning, and Roger Maris ended it. Curt Flood was in the game, not too long before he changed the sport forever off the field. He batted behind Ed Spiezio and Julian Javier, whose sons would eventually play and affect an entirely different generation of baseball players. When Uecker was unceremoniously removed from the game on a double switch, he was replaced behind the plate by Joe Torre, one of the few baseball players with a Hall-of-Fame-caliber resume as a player and a manager. Lou Brock entered the game as a pinch-hitter and popped out because sometimes the superstars and Hall of Famers don’t do anything. The game was eventually decided by a two-run double from Tim McCarver in the top of the 11th inning, and he’d eventually be a part of as many baseball memories as anyone else in the game.
It was a meaningless game, played with just a couple days left in the season, with the Cardinals on their way to 101 wins and a pennant that they’d clinched weeks before. But it was still important enough for Gibson to pitch nine innings and for the stars to stick around and take their at-bats in extras.
And there was Uecker, who wasn’t good enough to trust with the game on the line. He entered the game as a career .200 hitter, a nice round number that’s always going to be associated with futility and frustration. With one hit, he would have finished his career with a .201 batting average. He couldn’t get it, so he finished with a .1997264022 batting average. It rounds up to .200.
That’s all of baseball in a single game. It meant everything and nothing. There were heroes and legends, with some of them defined by what they did after baseball. It was a Friday night game, which meant it was the perfect opportunity to watch a baseball game, just like all of the other days and nights. And it was someone ending his playing career, only to start a new career, in which he’d spend the rest of his life reminding us of a simple truth.
Baseball is fun. Mr. Baseball reminded us of this for decades, and he’ll continue reminding us of it for as long as the sport is around.
(Top photo of Bob Uecker before a Brewers game: Jeffrey Phelps / MLB Photos via Getty Images)
