This story was excerpted from Adam McCalvy’s Brewers Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

MILWAUKEE – Catcher-turned-broadcaster Bill Schroeder never anticipated being a published author. Now, he’s a published author twice over. 

Schroeder and co-author Drew Olson have released a revised and updated edition of "If These Walls Could Talk: Stories from the Milwaukee Brewers Dugout, Locker Room and Press Box." Published by Triumph Books, and with forewords from Bob Uecker and Craig Counsell, the book was originally released in 2016, and the update includes chapters featuring Christian Yelich’s first two MVP-caliber seasons in Milwaukee in 2018-19, Corbin Burnes’ Cy Young Award-winning 2021 campaign and Counsell’s rise to be the winningest manager in franchise history. 

It’s a collaboration between Schroeder, who has provided color commentary on Brewers telecasts for the last 29 years, and Olson, the former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel beat reporter who is now a sports talk radio host on Milwaukee’s 97.3 The Game. 

“We met at a diner one morning and, for a couple of hours, we talked about everything,” Schroeder said. “We talked about how Counsell has put his mark on this team, and Burnes and Yelich, what we thought about them [when they came to Milwaukee] and what we think about them now.

“I talk to him, and he writes the book. I have no idea how to write. But it’s driven by my feelings and my thoughts, and the eye test of all this stuff. It worked out great. Drew is really good. He did a great job with this.”

It was Olson who originally approached Schroeder with the idea for the collaboration. Schroeder was in, and they wrote about the most notable figures in Brewers history, the franchise’s greatest games and scores of behind-the-scenes stories and insight from the dugout, locker room, training room, team plane and elsewhere over the years. The section on Brewers nicknames, from Skid to The Rat to Divot Head, is not to be missed. 

One section was educational for the author himself. On Feb. 27, 1986, Schroeder suffered burns on his chest when a gas line exploded at the Brewers’ new Spring Training facility in Chandler, Ariz. Several coaches and players suffered serious injuries, but no one was killed. 

“When we were writing the book, I talked to John Adam, who was our trainer at the time,” Schroeder said. “There was an amazing amount of information about that day that I never knew. I was running the heck out with my hair on fire – literally. I didn’t know all [the medical officials] had to do that day.” 

The updated edition was officially released May 9 and can be found on Triumph Books’ website, from Amazon or your favorite bookseller. 

“It’s the kind of book you can read a chapter here, a chapter there, and you try to keep it light,” Schroeder said. “We had fun with it.”