Originally published: 2025-01-17T17:30:00+00:00. Historical source article: benefits, rules, amounts and deadlines may have changed. Check the official source for current information.
Bob Uecker was born in January 1934 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to a Swiss immigrant father, Gus, and mother, Mary, from Michigan. The eldest of three, Bob spent his youth playing baseball and cheering for the hometown Milwaukee Brewers, then of the “American Association.”
Little is known of Uecker’s military service, but after leaving high school, he enlisted in the Army in 1954 and appears to have spent the next two years playing baseball at Forts Leonard Wood and Belvoir, in Missouri and Virginia.
When his enlistment ended, the aspiring catcher signed with MLB’s then-named Milwaukee Braves. The future broadcast Hall of Famer wasn’t known for his in-game skill—behind the plate or at it. After several years in the minor leagues, he played for four MLB teams from 1962 to 1967—winning a World Championship with the St. Louis Cardinals as a backup catcher in 1964.
After the 1967 season in which he led the National League in passed balls and catcher errors, and with a career .200 batting average and -1.0 career WAR, Uecker retired. Bud Selig, a Milwaukee native and future MLB commissioner, who was the then-owner of the Brewers, hired Uecker as a scout.
“The worst scout in baseball history,” Selig said of Uecker in September 2021. “My instinct told me he could be a hell of an announcer.”
Selig was right.
Beginning in 1971, Uecker would spend the next 54 years calling games for his beloved Brewers. “Mr. Baseball,” Johnny Carson nicknamed him, after scores of appearances on the comedian’s late night “Tonight Show,” would also go on to film TV commercials, host “Saturday Night Live,” and star in the TV comedy, “Mr. Belvedere.” Outside of Milwaukee, Uecker was perhaps best known for his role as the lovably intoxicated exaggeration-of-himself broadcaster Harry Doyle, in the 1989 baseball comedy “Major League.”
Uecker was enshrined in the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame, the National Radio Hall of Fame, the celebrity wing of the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame, and as the 2003 Ford C. Frick Award recipient by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
Uecker, 90, died at his home in Wisconsin on January 16, 2025.
We honor his service.
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