We learned of Bob Uecker’s death. I had no idea that he was ill but it happens. He died two weeks shy of his 91st birthday. Amazing.
Uecker was the local kid who played with the Milwaukee Braves and then called the Milwaukee Brewers’ games on the radio for 50 years. He got the job when President Nixon was in the White House, so that’s a long time ago. (For a little history, the Braves moved to Atlanta after the 1965 season and the Seattle Pilots moved to Milwaukee before the 1970 season. That’s how baseball came back to the old County Stadium.)
For many fans outside of Milwaukee, Uecker made TV commercials and was the Cleveland Indians’ announcer in the hilarious movie Major League. Yes, the Indians, before political correctness renamed them Guardians.
According to every baseball fan I know, the movie is worth your time. The characters are classic and no one was better than Uecker as the team’s announcer. This is from Drew Weisholtz:
Bob Uecker had the kind of career stat line that would be sad if it wasn’t so funny. But funny is what would ultimately cement his legacy.
Uecker, who died Jan. 16 at the age of 90, was a career .200 hitter across six seasons in Major League Baseball. He ultimately embraced his own ineptitude, often mocking himself for his lack of ability on the diamond.
Uecker took his schtick and ran with it, all the way to Hollywood. Nicknamed “Mr. Baseball,” he was a frequent, gut-busting guest on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” for years after he retired. He appeared in several well-known Miller Lite commercials, in which he poked fun at himself when he declared, “I must be in the front row” after an usher at a game informs him that he’s in the wrong seats. He parlayed those efforts into a starring role on the small screen, playing George Owens on the ABC sitcom “Mr. Belvedere,” which ran for six seasons from 1985 until 1990.
But all of that may have just been a prologue for what seems like a casting job that was as natural as a tailor-made 4-6-3 double play. In the hit 1989 movie “Major League,” Uecker played Cleveland play-by-play announcer Harry Doyle, whose wit would often serve as cover for how awful the team was, only for him to get caught up in the fervor when the team begins winning.
“Juuuust a bit outside,” he casually says early in the movie, stretching out the word “just” when Charlie Sheen’s Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn throws a pitch more than a few feet off home plate during the team’s first game. It’s one of the movie’s best and most memorable lines.
Doyle is also crestfallen when he tries to amplify the sound of the crowd on Opening Day and gets feisty when he curses on air.
“Don’t worry. No one’s listening anyway,” he says.
It’s funny, but it may have also been pioneering.
It was all too funny, especially in January counting down to spring training. Some of the lines are not suitable for a family gathering with little kids or grandmothers but that’s life sometimes. You are warned!
Of course, Harry Doyle gave us the Indians forever. Every future generation that laughs to tears over the movie will probably ask the same question: What happened to the Indians?
You can answer the question with a Rocky Colavito card and a comment of how PC killed one of the greatest franchise names ever. After all, does anyone want Bob Feller on a Guardians’ uniform? Not me.
So thanks to Uecker for his humor and to a movie that enshrined the Indians in our minds.
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Image: Steve Paluch
This article was originally published at www.americanthinker.com
