That Elusive Quality: Fun.

Bob Uecker had it. Full stop

Thank you for reading The Dope.

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Among the most unrealistic expectations we have for pro sports is that they should be fun. “Fun” — that’s a loaded term. Fun for whom? Well, for us, absolutely. We barely have any skin in the game. Still, we all know plenty of miserable fans. For the pro athletes themselves, meanwhile, fun = survival, and after that, maybe, sometimes, winning. It’s Squid Game with a ball and glove.

So for Bob Uecker to walk the line, and he did so constantly, was equal parts impressive and inspiring. We all want to be around a person who can remind us that it’s not always so serious out there in the big bad world. Uecker could do that, even though he’d been a baseball player himself — at MLB, the highest level in the world — and truly, deeply understood that it was an absolute terror of a landscape for the people who were trying to make a living at it. But he was broadcasting to the folks who loved baseball as a game, not an industry. He knew to whom he was speaking.

Uecker died on Thursday and we won’t be the same. That’s the short of it. Baseball lost a light. It has other lights, but this light was special. It shone particularly in one town, one city, and yet everybody in the baseball world could see it. You don’t get that all the time.

Uecker was 90. He worked until he died, honestly. He was on the call for his beloved Milwaukee Brewers’ final game of the 2024 season, a gut-ripper of a loss to the Mets in the N.L. Wild Card round in which the Brewers blew a 2-0 lead in the ninth.

Here is audio of Uecker’s last few post-game seconds on air. (I hope this link works.) His words would have gone out to the thousands and thousands of Brewers fans who unceasingly, daily, found the radio broadcast so they could listen to Bob:

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You can hear the real pain in those words, in the same way that Uecker’s utter joy at seeing the Brewers win their division again last season had felt so genuine. That’s a fan who knew baseball, which explains why people never got tired of hearing Uecker speak.

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I was lucky enough to meet Vin Scully several times, and with Vin, you usually got sort of ushered in, like you were seeing royalty. Scully never acted like royalty at all, don’t get me wrong; but the people around him were protective, particularly in later days, and they guarded his time, which seemed like the right thing to do. It never bothered me.

With Uecker, it was totally different. It was like seeing Harry Caray. You’d be in the press box, meandering around, and here would come Uecker approaching down the same narrow hallway. (There was only ever one hallway.) He’d be going somewhere or coming back from somewhere in a hurry, because they had but a couple of quick minutes in between half-innings before they had to be back on air.

So he had to do everything fast. But Uecker would be talking and walking, and when you came within eyesight he simply added you to whatever conversation he was already in the midst of, with whomever was around him. It was something like this as a thought process: “You’re a ball writer. We’re the same. Let’s talk ball.” And you’d get a quick couple of sentences about Yount or Molitor or Cecil Cooper or Jimmy Gantner — I’m dating myself with these references — and then Uecker would go on cruising down the hallway. Had to keep going.

Uecker was a continuous chat with your funniest friend — funny ha-ha, but also funny-unintentional. That’s how it felt.

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I didn’t know him well. I knew him a little. But if you knew him even a little, you felt like it was more, because the man was so open to the universe and, I don’t know, unthreatened by everything. He had battled heart surgeries and pancreatic cancer and a serious spider bite and Covid through the decades. He fought small-cell lung cancer over the past two years, though nobody knew it.

He liked that people liked him, but he didn’t make a big deal of it. It just made things more fun for him. And he would, in turn, go on the air and make things more fun for other people.

That’s certainly a job well done, and it is a life well lived. Baseball was better with Uecker in it. I know I’m right.

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