Bob Uecker, the clubhouse wit who turned his tales of inferiority as a major league catcher into a comic narrative that animated his second career as a sportscaster and commercial pitchman, died on Thursday at his home in Menomonee Falls, Wis. He was 90.
His family announced the death in a statement released by the Milwaukee Brewers, for whom he had long been a broadcaster. The statement said he had been treated for small-cell lung cancer since early 2023.
Uecker proved himself undistinguished during his six seasons as a major leaguer in the 1960s. He eked out a career batting average of .200, hit 14 home runs and drove in 74 runs. A career reserve player, he never started more than 62 games in a season for the Milwaukee and Atlanta Braves, the St. Louis Cardinals or the Philadelphia Phillies.
“To last as long as I did, with the skills I had, was a triumph of the human spirit,” Uecker said in his memoir, “Catcher in the Wry” (1982), written with Mickey Herskowitz.
He told self-deprecating stories — some true, some not — as if he had played baseball only to gather material for a stand-up comedy routine.
“I was once named minor league player of the year,” he said. “Unfortunately, I had been in the majors for two years at the time.”
All that time, idling on dugout benches and in bullpens imbued Uecker with a deep knowledge of baseball. That was apparent during his radio broadcasts for the Brewers, where he started in 1971 as the play-by-play voice and continued through last season.
Uecker recognized that a close game did not need much of his wit, but a blowout begged for it.
“If we’re not doing well, you have to do something to keep people listening,” he told MLB Network in 2015. In those moments, he added, “I used to talk about Pete Vuckovich’s nose hairs every day he was here,” referring to a longtime Milwaukee pitcher.
Uecker was a beloved figure in Milwaukee — “the light of the Brewers” and the “laughter in our hearts,” the team said in a statement — and he became nationally known for his comic turns in a popular advertising campaign for Miller Lite beer in the 1980s, and for his role as Harry Doyle, the fictional voice of the former Cleveland Indians, in the hit movie comedy “Major League” (1989).
The Miller Lite campaign, built around a debate over whether the low-calorie beer tasted great or was less filling, featured many sports celebrities.
In his best-known commercial, Uecker threaded his way to a box seat at a ballpark. But when an usher interrupted him to say he was in the wrong seat, Uecker responded, “Oh, I must be in the front row!” He was led instead to a seat in a remote part of the stadium.
“Good seats, eh, buddy?” he shouted amid a sea of empty seats.
The sight of Uecker perched at such a distance became so much a part of his image that, in 2014, a statue of him was installed in the faraway reaches of the upper deck of Miller Park in Milwaukee.
“I think when I finally go, I might want to go like that,” he said on the day the statue was dedicated. “Seated and above ground.”
Remarkably, it was the second statue of Uecker to be installed at the ballpark. Two years earlier, the Brewers had unveiled one outside the stadium, near those of the Hall of Fame players Henry Aaron and Robin Yount.
“If you listen closely, you can hear Henry’s statue begging to be relocated,” the sportscaster Bob Costas, a friend and colleague of Uecker’s, said at the dedication.
Robert George Uecker was born in Milwaukee on Jan. 26, 1934. His father, August, a Swiss immigrant, was a tool and die maker, and his mother, Mary (Schultz) Uecker, ran the home. The Ueckers lived near Borchert Field, the home of an earlier minor-league iteration of the Brewers. Young Bob and his friends often sneaked in to watch games.
One of Uecker’s standard jokes was about his father’s angry reaction to the Braves’ offer to sign him for $3,000.
“We were a poor family and, frankly, he didn’t have that kind of cash,” Uecker said. “Finally he scraped it up and got me to leave home again.”
Uecker hit for power and average in the Braves’ minor league system. Before the 1961 season, he thought he had made the Braves’ major-league roster, but the manager, Chuck Dressen, sent him down to the Louisville minor-league team with a warning.
“There is no room in baseball for a clown,” Uecker recalled Dressen telling him.
Apparently, though, there was. He joined the Braves in 1962 but played sparingly, as he did again in 1963, when he spent part of the season in the minor leagues.
He was traded to the Cardinals in 1964, to the Phillies in 1965 and back to the Braves (who had moved to Atlanta) in 1967. In a career with little to brag about, he was proudest that the two home runs he hit in 1965 were both against future Hall of Fame pitchers, Sandy Koufax and Gaylord Perry.
“Perry said it was the worst day of his life,” Uecker told MLB Network, feigning surprise. “Not just his baseball life. His whole life.”
Uecker claimed that a Cardinal trainer had injected him with the hepatitis virus to prevent him from playing in the 1964 World Series, in which the Cardinals beat the Yankees in seven games. He was on the team’s roster but did not enter any of those games — the first-string catcher, Tim McCarver, played every inning, hitting .478.
Of all Uecker’s statistics, one stands out the most: He led the major leagues in passed balls in 1967. Allowing 27 pitches to bounce, roll or skitter past him in just 76 games behind the plate was an extraordinary feat — one of the worst defensive performances for a catcher in modern baseball history.
But those failures were, in part, understandable. Most of those uncaught pitches were fluttery knuckleballs thrown by Braves’ Phil Niekro. For Niekro, 1967 was a breakout season, and he later credited Uecker with encouraging him to throw nothing but the knuckler.
“Ueck told me if I was ever going to be a winner, to throw the knuckleball at all times, and he would try to catch it,” Niekro told The Oklahoman in 1988.
Uecker’s experience with Niekro’s hard-to-catch pitch inspired one of his most often quoted lines.
“The way to catch a knuckleball,” he said, “is to wait until it stops rolling and then pick it up.”
Uecker’s playing days ended mercifully when the Braves released him in 1968, after he had hit .146 the previous season.
He did not recede into hard-earned obscurity. He worked for the Braves in the organization’s speakers bureau and on their television broadcasts. His natural comedic timing and boisterous personality also made him a popular speaker at banquets, which led to a friendship with the trumpeter Al Hirt, who booked him at his Atlanta nightclub in 1969.
Hirt then helped Uecker get on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” where in dozens of appearances Carson giggled at Uecker’s deadpan yarns.
After his first appearance on the show, Uecker recalled that Carson and his sidekick, Ed McMahon, expressed doubt about whether his baseball stories were true.
“I walked away and I hear Johnny say to Ed, ‘Did that guy really play baseball?’” Uecker said in a 2016 interview on “Feherty,” the golf analyst David Feherty’s series on the Golf Channel. “And Ed says, ‘I think so.’ Neither of them believed I’d played ball.”
His broadcasting career with the Brewers began with a detour. He was hired by Bud Selig, the team’s owner and a future commissioner of Major League Baseball, as a scout. But Selig called Uecker the “worst scout I ever had,” most notably for turning in his first scouting reports smeared with mashed potatoes and gravy from his dinner.
In addition to calling Brewers games for 54 years, Uecker worked as an analyst for ABC Sports in 1976 on its “Monday Night Baseball” franchise, where he stayed until 1982. One night, during a game he was calling with Al Michaels and Howard Cosell, Uecker corrected Cosell on a strategic point that was clearly wrong.
“Uecky, I get your point,” Cosell said, according to Michaels’s autobiography. “But you don’t have to be so truculent. You do know what truculent means, don’t you?”
The quick-witted Uecker responded: “Of course, Howard. If you had a truck and I borrowed it, it would be a truck-you-lent.”
Uecker returned to network announcing in the 1990s for NBC, but he always kept his job with the Brewers.
As Harry Doyle in “Major League,” which starred Charlie Sheen and Tom Berenger as players on a moribund fictional version of the Cleveland Indians, Uecker played an inebriated, say-anything extension of himself. He ad-libbed all his lines, including what is probably his best known.
When the Sheen character throws a pitch several feet from the strike zone, Doyle says, “Juuuuuuust a bit outside,” and adds, as an aside, “Tried the corner and missed.”
It was not Doyle’s most outrageous line, but it became synonymous with any wildly errant pitch thrown, whether by Little Leaguers or major leaguers. Uecker reprised the character in “Major League” sequels in 1994 and 1998.
Uecker also played George Owens, a sportswriter, on “Mr. Belvedere,” a sitcom about a British butler working for an American family, seen on ABC from 1985 to 1990.
When Uecker accepted the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasting excellence from the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2003, he expressed one regret.
“I still — and this is not sour grapes by any means — think I should have gone in as a player,” he said, as the Hall of Famers seated behind him laughed.
He was also inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame for his two appearances as an announcer at Wrestlemania events in the late 1980s. At one, in 1988, Uecker was choked briefly by André the Giant, who took offense to Uecker’s calling his massive hand a foot.
Uecker is survived by his longtime partner, Judy Uecker, from whom he was divorced but with whom he had reunited; his daughter, Sue Uecker; a son, Bob Jr.; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Another son, Steve, died in 2012 from complications of San Joaquin Valley fever; another daughter, Leann Uecker Ziemer, died of A.L.S. in 2022. His marriage to Joyce Jahn ended in divorce.
While Uecker did not play in the 1964 World Series, he still had a memorable on-field moment. Before Game 2 at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, he picked up a tuba that was lying idle in the outfield while a marching band took a break.
“I put it on and went out in the outfield and starting shagging fly balls with it,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1995. “I didn’t catch them all. Some made dents in the tuba, but I caught a couple.”
The Cardinals were not amused by his prank. The team deducted $260 for the damage to the tuba from his World Series winner’s check of $8,622.