The Milwaukee Brewers have sadly lost radio announcer Bob Uecker at the age of 90. Uecker had been announcing games for Milwaukee since 1971. Dominic Pino reports on Uecker’s life in National Review, writing:
There has only been one season of Milwaukee Brewers baseball that was not called on the radio by Bob Uecker. Now, sadly, there will be more. Uecker died on Thursday at the age of 90.
After one dismal season as the Seattle Pilots in 1969, the Brewers franchise moved to Milwaukee in 1970. Uecker became the radio play-by-play announcer in 1971.
It was not inevitable that the franchise would outlive Uecker. He had to watch a lot of bad baseball in one of MLB’s smallest markets. The Brewers didn’t break .500 for the first time until 1978. They didn’t make the play-offs for the first time until 1981.
In 1982, the Brewers went to the World Series, losing in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals. This remains the best performance in the franchise’s history. Led by future Hall of Famers Robin Yount and Paul Molitor, the team was nicknamed “Harvey’s Wallbangers,” named for manager Harvey Kuenn, who took the helm mid-season.
The Brewers were mediocre to terrible for the next two decades. Their next play-off appearance was not until 2008. They are one of only five active MLB teams to have never won the World Series.
Yet Milwaukee has a dedicated fan base. And a big part of the reason why is that no matter what was happening on the field, there was one thing Brewers fans could always rely on: Bob Uecker on the radio.
He was born in Milwaukee and had played catcher — poorly, by his own constant, self-deprecating admission — for the Milwaukee Braves in 1962 and 1963. He was such a Milwaukee institution that he didn’t have a written contract for most of the years he announced. You simply knew he would be there.
If things weren’t going well for the Brew Crew, that almost made the radio broadcasts better, because it gave Uecker more space to tell stories. He brought the game to life for listeners with his words, but plenty of times his stories had little to do with baseball. Some story about playing golf with a famous actor in the 1980s would be punctuated with “and the pitch . . . 2–1 on Braun,” followed by more of the story.
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