Bob Uecker played baseball, yes. He also called baseball games on the radio for an incredible 54 years.
Uecker was an actor, as well. As charitable a person as one could find.
But probably nobody would argue that Uecker’s overriding talent during his incredible 90 years of life was his ability to make people feel good.
To make them smile.
To make them laugh.
“My dad used to say that every time you make someone laugh, you add 15 minutes to his life,” recounted Milwaukee Brewers team principal owner Mark Attanasio early Thursday evening.
He, his wife Debbie and sons Dan and Mike shared their remembrances on a Zoom call with media members in the wake of the Baseball Hall of Famer’s death of small cell lung cancer, a battle he had been waging unknown to most since early 2023.
“I’ve known Bob 20 seasons now and he’s added several years to my life,” Attanasio continued. “He brought out the best in all of us. And he’s really the heart of Milwaukee baseball.
“Mr. Baseball.”
Attanasio and his ownership group assumed control of the Brewers franchise in 2005 and not long thereafter, he made it known that he’d like to introduce himself to and perhaps get to know a little bit two of the franchise’s icons in Uecker and Robin Yount.
“Both Ueck and Robin, I was sort of a newbie from who knows where. Los Angeles, the big city,” Attanasio, also a native New Yorker, remembered. “They didn’t know anything about my background as a finance guy. That’s the last thing you want to be involved with if you’re a ballplayer.
“And Ueck, really to the end, was a ballplayer. Commissioner (Bud) Selig would tell me, ‘Bob’s a ballplayer,’ so he really wouldn’t meet with me. Wendy Selig-Prieb really pressured him. He said he’d give me 30 minutes before the first owners’ meeting I was going to.
“That became three hours and a lifelong friendship.”
But Uecker would never relent on signing an actual contract with the team, despite Attanasio’s urging to do so.
“When I think about that first meeting, that was one of the first things that I thought about. ‘Bob, we’d like to have you signed up.’ And, you know, I don’t think he was ready to commit to me,” recalled Attanasio, who was well aware of former New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner’s previous, multiple efforts to hire Uecker away from Selig’s Brewers.
“So, basically, he blew me off on the contract. But, I really felt like one of the honors for me was that everything was on a handshake, and that he trusted me.”
Attanasio & Co. would approach Uecker periodically over the years to see if he’d changed his mind.
“Every year we asked,” said president of business operations Rick Schlesinger. “And every year he said, ‘No, a handshake is good enough for me.'”
Uecker’s relationship carried over to Debbie Attanasio and the couple’s boys as well. Using his trademark humor during a broadcast one time, he joked while Debbie was in the booth that she was having celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck bake brownies for the Brewers’ wives bakeoff.
Then, with son Dan in the midst of choosing a college, Uecker quipped, “Instead of going on a college tour, why doesn’t your dad just buy you a college?” Then, after being informed Dan would be studying Spanish at said college, Uecker followed up with, “I know Spanish. That was a swing and a miss-O!”
But the Attanasios also got to a much deeper level with Uecker, a graduate of Boys Tech who over the years transformed from a little-known catcher with the Milwaukee Braves in the early 1960s into, really, a nationwide – if not worldwide – icon that easily crossed between the entertainment and baseball worlds from the early 1970s on.
“I think that he taught me the importance of being yourself,” Debbie Attanasio said. “He could spot a phony a mile away. He actually didn’t mind that I was so anxious during games that I would come close to vomiting. And he said, ‘Let me see it.’ He was that way.
“He was so genuine, and he told me that was what people in Milwaukee were, and I needed to get used to it. But I was, in fact, and that’s what I like the most about the people in Milwaukee. We had that in common. And there was not a phony bone in Bob’s body.”
During the Brewers’ recent unprecedented run of success, during which they’ve advanced to the postseason in six of the past seven years, Uecker’s presence in the wild postgame clinch celebrations often sparked viral moments.
“He was one of them. He has a locker downstairs (in the Brewers clubhouse),” Attanasio said. “My favorite celebration picture with all of us is one where he’s in the front, champagne dumped on his head and with a cigar in his ear. He celebrated more than our biggest partying players, frankly, when we won.”
At some point in recent years, Attanasio started doing some rough calculations in his head.
“I talked to him about this: He broadcast 162 games in six months,” Attanasio said. “There’s, like, two days off a month every day in the summer, and then he did spring training. And he wanted to do all the spring training games even to the end. And then, of course, we had playoff games, and he did national games.
“So, I did some math, and it was, like, 11,000 games that he broadcast. And then he told me he did more. He was our broadcaster for 54 years.
“Fifty-four years.”
In a battle for his life after the cancer diagnosis in 2023, Uecker was able to compartmentalize and take stock of the things that truly mattered most as time went on and his treatments continued.
“He was at peace with dying for a while,” said Attanasio. “He used to joke years ago about having a giveaway with him popping up out of a coffin and saying, ‘Get up! Get up! Get out of here!’ Then back down and the coffin would close. He still made those jokes. But he would talk about the end of life and what everything meant to him, and he had an acceptance and seriousness about him.
“When I went to go visit him at his home before Thanksgiving, most of the conversation was just telling stories and reliving some good times. Some of it was what he was facing. The number of things that he’d surmounted, health-wise, over the years is probably close to nine lives. And with that, he was always forward looking – thought he’d make it to spring training.
“That wasn’t God’s plan for him. But he came within 10 days of his 91st birthday, which is pretty special.”
Attanasio at one point also used a series of adjectives to describe Uecker.
“Humble. Legend. Icon. Loyal. Kind. Strong. Genuine. Charitable. Self-effacing. Colorblind. Gifted. Genuine. Authentic. Candid. Caring,” is how the list ended up.
Attanasio made clear there are plans in the works for ways to further honor Uecker in the future, with a big celebration sometime in the summer and a “Uecker Experience” that will be similar to the “Selig Experience” that was presented by the Brewers some years back.
Whatever the organization can come up with probably won’t be enough, considering how loved and revered Uecker is.
“Bob Uecker is not replaceable,” Attanasio said. “He was a true man of the people, without saying he was a man of people.”
