‘Comedic Genius’: MLB Hall Of Fame Broadcaster Bob Uecker Dies At 90

Bob Uecker, who played major-league baseball for six years for the Milwaukee Braves, Philadelphia Phillies, St. Louis Cardinals, and Atlanta Braves before starting a legendary career as the Milwaukee Brewers’ broadcaster for a whopping 54 years, died on Thursday at the age of 90.

Uecker’s career was anything but legendary; he finished his career with a lowly .200 batting average and only 14 home runs with 731 at-bats. “To make people laugh is a good thing. I used to get questions from my kids about, ‘Why do you do that? Why do you talk about yourself the way you do?’ I said, ‘Because it’s funny and it makes people laugh,” Uecker said.

“Could he hit?” the legendary slugger Hank Aaron quipped. “I’m just glad I didn’t take his advice. (Hall of Fame pitcher Warren) Spahn, (Hall of Fame third-baseman Eddie) Mathews, myself, we would talk about hitting and everybody would tell, ‘Bob, this conversation you’re out of.”

“I roomed with him in St. Louis,” former Cardinals star catcher and later famed broadcaster Tim McCarver recalled. “And from day one he was screamingly funny.”

“If the ball club was going bad he could say something that could make everybody laugh, relax,” Aaron remembered.

Uecker would joke about signing with his hometown Milwaukee Braves for $3,000 in 1956, “That bothered my dad at the time because he didn’t have that kind of dough. But he eventually scraped it up.”

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“He’s very funny on the air. But he’s an exceptionally good broadcaster,” Bob Costas declared. “You really feel the game through him.”

“I think where he really shines is when the game is 11 to 2, and it’s the sixth inning, because then you have to go to plan B, and he starts telling stories,” Pat Hughes, his broadcast partner from 1984-1995, said. “That aspect differentiates him maybe, from any other play-by-play man that’s ever lived.”

“Bob is a comedic genius. And no one would have seen it had he not gone on Johnny Carson and done what he did,” McCarver asserted. Carson laughed so often at Uecker’s jokes that he had Uecker on frequently, more than 100 times, and called him “Mr. Baseball.” Uecker’s frequent appearances on “The Tonight Show” led to TV and movie roles. But in the end, it was baseball for which he was famous.

Milwaukee adored Uecker. McCarver noted, “When a man has two statues of himself, one outside the stadium and one inside the stadium, that gives you an idea of just how much Bob Uecker has meant to the city of Milwaukee.”

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