Bob Uecker, who died Thursday at 90, was a mediocre Major League Baseball player and exceptional Milwaukee Brewers radio announcer who made an improbable transition to entertainment. Showcasing a bone-dry deadpan style in dozens of appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, he parlayed minor celebrity into bona fide stardom through a series of bombastic Miller Lite commercials. Unlike many athletes who appear in ads and acting roles, Uecker wasn’t just an eccentric who was comfortable on camera and behind microphones, but a skilled and adaptable performer who evolved over the decades until he became an institution.
Those Miller spots captured the breadth of his appeal and put him on the map as a pitchman. In a 1983 ad, featuring a young John Goodman, Uecker is celebrated by adoring fans in a bar before it’s revealed that he told everyone he’s Hall-of-Fame pitcher Whitey Ford. Uecker steadily morphed into an increasingly manic presence, best displayed in a 1984 commercial in which he plays up his inflated sense of importance, strolling into a ballpark with a ticket he brags is a “freebie” for an “ex-big leaguer.” As he walks to what he claims is his seat, somebody offscreen yells “Down in front!”, and a beat later an usher who doesn’t recognize him insists that he relocate to where he belongs. Uecker responds, sublimely, “Ahhhhh must be in the frunt row!”; the spot ends with him far away in a remote upper deck.
That Uecker 2.0 persona travelled well to scripted TV and film. He played a sportswriter patriarch on the sitcom Mr. Belvedere and a heightened version of himself as the broadcaster in three Major League films. He took on guest roles in other comedies, including Who’s the Boss, appeared in the comedy films O.C. and Stiggs and Fatal Instinct, hosted Saturday Night Live and wrote two memoirs—the best-selling The Catcher in the Wry and the less successful Catch .222. Over time he achieved a comic legacy such that the late Norm MacDonald once made David Letterman collapse in giggles by relating how he shared the Brewers booth with Uecker as the announcer contrasted rocker John Fogerty’s golf skills against his supposed reputation as “some f—-r who bites the heads off chickens.” (Fogerty has never, to anyone’s knowledge, bitten the head off a chicken.)
Uecker’s iceberg-cool deadpan made him a secret talk show MVP in the years before Miller Lite turned him into a household name. He booked his first Tonight Show appearance via jazz trumpeter and bandleader Al Hirt, who saw him open for Don Rickles in 1969 and recommended him to Carson, whose show was already known as a launching pad for talented or simply charming people whose careers hadn’t blasted off yet. Hirt called it right. Uecker proved to be an ideal Carson guest: semi-famous, a bit odd, and confident enough to adapt to whatever happened during taping.
See this 1976 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in which Uecker, in a near-monotone voice, makes himself sound like a party animal. “You know, you go into a bar after a ball game,” he tells Carson, “you’re sitting there three or four hours, popping a few, and sooner or later, somebody’s gonna step on your hand, you know?” The audience laughs even when he doesn’t seem to be trying for laughs. That’s a rare gift, and Mel Brooks, who is sitting beside Uecker on the couch, recognizes it, tossing Uecker the comedic equivalent of slow pitches over home plate. When Uecker gripes about baseball legends like Mickey Mantle lowering society’s collective standards by doing TV ads for jock itch ointment, Brooks mimes barfing into his coffee cup, but Uecker keeps going, unfazed by one of the funniest men on earth. “Doing eight minutes on jock itch!” Brooks delightedly exclaims.
The Miller Lite ad team clocked that skill, too, presenting him as the self-appointed Life of the Party even when there was no party. In another memorable Miller ad, Uecker joins stone-faced Romanian ice hockey player and tennis coach Ion Țiriac in a bar, crowing about what a grand time they’re about to have as Țiriac stays silent. Within a couple of years of his pitchman debut, Uecker was such a phenomenon that Miller put him in a feature film-quality ad that parodied a drawing room murder mystery, “The Case of the Missing Case” opposite Rodney Dangerfield and Mickey Spillane. Uecker’s gig as the Miller pitchman lasted 17 years and paired him with such (unironically) famous names as Billy Martin, John Madden, Joe Frazier, and Mr. Jock Itch himself, Mickey Mantle.
Uecker was, to be sure, a better performer than athlete. After getting called up to the Milwaukee Braves in 1962 he played catcher for four teams across six seasons, ending up with 14 career home runs and a batting average of just .200. He did win a World Series ring with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1964, but his playing career was mainly notable as a stepping stone to something else. When people would ask him to name his career highlights, his go-to joke was, “I got an intentional walk from Sandy Koufax and I got out of a rundown against the Mets.”
After retiring from baseball he became a sensation behind the microphone in a way that he never achieved behind the plate, spending 54 seasons as radio announcer for the Milwaukee Brewers, right up through the most recent campaign. (His former team the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta in 1966; the Brewers arrived in the city four years later.) During that tenure — among the longest for an announcer with a single team in baseball history — Uecker infused his commentary with the same wit he’d deploy on late night shows, filling idle moments with self-deprecating anecdotes from his time in the game. His energy was infectious and unceasing; it was remarkable to hear him, at 90, unfurl his trademark home run call “Get up, get up, get out here!” with the same enthusiasm he tapped into throughout his career.
Early in his rise as an entertainer, Uecker was introduced at public events, on talk shows, and in those beer ads as “Mr. Baseball.” It was a cue for laughter, a nod at his unremarkable playing career. But by the late ‘80s, after the Miller commercials and acting roles and an announcing career that was nearly 20 years old and going strong, the irony fell away from “Mr. Baseball,” and Uecker genuinely came to embody that description. He was a welcome ambassador for a sport that has often struggled to trade on its stars’ personalities, or lack thereof.
Uecker’s longevity and ebullient spirit earned him a sportscasting legacy alongside such icons as Vin Scully, and made him a legend to generations of fans in Milwaukee, the city of his birth. The team has honored him with two statues at its American Family Field. The first is outside the ballpark: a traditional bronze statue, one of four honoring key figures from Milwaukee baseball history (the others are the Hall-of-Famers Hank Aaron and Robin Yount, and former Brewers owner and MLB commissioner Bud Selig). It’s the second statue, though, that best captures his spirit: it’s located inside, in the hinterlands of the uppermost deck. Uecker once again has the worst seat in the house again, but this time, it’s reserved.