Spring Won’t Be the Same: Goodbye Bob Uecker

Our town’s baseball announcer died today and everyone is sad.

He was 90 years old, still announcing for the Milwaukee Brewers last summer as he had for fifty-four years. Expert baseball folks, like my husband, could hear Bob Uecker slipping up now and then, he announced fewer innings of fewer games, and it almost seemed like the baseball club was putting up gentle guard rails for him. He was a person who could never be let go or retired. His seat and his microphone were his as long as he wanted them. As long as Ueck was in the booth, all was well in the world. The team knew it and the rest of us depended on it.

I remember driving home along the lake from a long meeting one early spring day years ago and turning on the car radio. There was Uecker’s voice, calling a spring training game. Snow still on the ground up here in Milwaukee, the sky overcast and dreary, Ueck was announcing the temperature in Arizona and raving about the sunshine, ribbing other broadcasters and telling funny stories about his dismal playing days. The delight, I felt in that moment, was visceral, the grin I had is still here somewhere, tucked away in a sweet spot. Spring is here. Baseball. My town. Uecker on the air. And I remember that tiny flash of time like it was yesterday. The happiness of it.

Very old people die. And when they die, we think, ‘well, they had a good run.’ But they can still leave a hole – their stories, their cooking, their good works, how they held the family together.

Bob Uecker, well, he left a happiness hole.

People are leaving flowers and cans of Miller Lite at the base of Uecker’s statue at American Family Field where the Milwaukee Brewers play. It’s nutty but I get it. Spring’s going to come without announcement this year, just slip in like the last guy on the bus. And that’s just the way it’ll be for a while. We get to be sad.