Baseball is back, and so is 'Mr. Baseball'

On the night when baseball is scheduled to return for the Brewers, next Friday when they play the Cubs, it is only right that Bob Uecker, "Mr. Baseball," will be calling the game. He is 86 now and would probably have five or six funny lines ready if you tried calling him a national treasure. But that is what he is. And he will be there for the first pitch on 620 WTMJ, officially starting his 50th season as the Brewers’ radio play-by-play man, even though the Brewers will be at Wrigley Field and he will be in his booth at Miller Park.

He has been in baseball for 65 years, he says, first as a player. It means he has been around long enough to see this kind of season, 60 games and then the postseason. When he broadcasts road games, as he will the season-opening series against the Cubs, he will work remotely, the way all baseball announcers will. Ueck, though, is the one who is 86. He will be especially careful, and the Brewers will be careful with him. He told me Friday that he had been tested for the coronavirus the previous week, and had once again come up negative.

So he will be there Friday night for Brewers fans the way he has been there for them since 1971. It is baseball news as fine and good as any this week.

“It’s gonna be different,” he said. “But I’m ready to get back to work. I’m like everybody else. I haven’t done a game since Spring Training. People tell me they’ve missed listening to me. Well, not any more than I’ve missed talking to them.”

He paused and added, “Like I said, gonna be different. I don’t know how I’m gonna react to not having people down below me, and I’m going to be real interested in seeing how the players react. But nothing’s changed. I’m still going to try to do a quality broadcast. And I’m still going to have fun, just without making fun of what’s happening in the world. Because what’s happening in the world sucks. Too many people got sick and too many people died.”

He has always been more than just baseball, Bob Uecker has. He became a television star because of his appearances with Johnny Carson on the old "The Tonight Show." He was a sitcom star with “Mr. Belvedere.” And, of course, he was the memorable and truly hilarious Harry Doyle, the Tribe's announcer, in the “Major League” movies. He also was part of those great Miller beer commercials back in the day.

But for a half-century now, he has been the radio voice of the Brewers. Over that time, he became one of the enduring voices of the game, all over Wisconsin and wherever else you could pick up the WTMJ signal. Satellite radio would later broaden that reach and take Ueck’s voice all over the country and the world. But the world that has mattered the most to him is the world of the Brewers.

There is no more personal relationship in broadcasting than the one, even now, between a radio broadcaster and his audience, and no more meaningful one than the one he has with the people who will hear the sound of his voice again next Friday night.

“You become part of their lives,” he said.

And then he threw out a line that explained the true beauty, even in the modern world, of baseball on the radio.

“Nobody knows anything until you tell them,” he said.

But even as the game comes back, Uecker spoke wistfully of all the things that he will miss this season, and will continue to miss until it is safe for fans to come back to the country’s ballparks. Really, he was talking about the true beauty and routine of his own baseball life.

“I miss being around the players,” he said. “I was in the clubhouse every day with them. They still treat me like one of the guys, not like an old man. Even when I stopped traveling as much as I used to, there was nothing about the club I didn’t know about.”

I asked him what he has missed the most in his time away.

“I’ve missed all of it,” he said. “Just going to the park, that was the biggest thing of all. Not just talking to the players. Talking to the ushers, and the people in the press box. I used to stop at the grounds crew office every single day. I’d talk to the security guys. It was all part of my family life. The family of baseball, I guess you’d call it.”

No one would suggest that the return of baseball is a return of normalcy for baseball fans or anybody else in America. But next Friday night, Bob Uecker will at least help those listening remember the way things were before everything changed last spring.

And he is still Ueck. He spoke on Friday about the new normal for him, just as a broadcaster, and how he will be separated even from his broadcast partners by plexiglass.

“I did call the owner [Mark Attanasio] and tell him that if it will save him a few bucks, I can bubble wrap myself,” Ueck said.

Then he spoke again about the sounds of baseball that will be missed in empty stadiums -- the people walking through the stands selling concessions, the public address announcer and the roar of the crowd most of all. But one thing that has not changed for Brewers fans, 50 years after he first sat down in the old radio booth at County Stadium, is this:

The sound of Bob Uecker’s voice. Baseball comes back this week. So does Mr. Baseball.