Ray Kowalczyk called me at 6:40 this morning, which is how I know somebody died. Ray doesn’t call before nine for good news. He said, “Duke. Uecker,” and then he didn’t say anything else for a long time, because Ray is from a generation that understood a pause on the telephone was allowed to do work. Bob Uecker was ninety years old, and he spent fifty-four of those years in a booth in Milwaukee telling you what was happening on a baseball field, and he did it without once, to my knowledge, referring to himself as a storyteller.
You don’t know how rare that is anymore until you try to find a man under fifty in a headset who hasn’t described his job that way. They all say it now. They say it on their podcasts, which they all have. They say it in the little sit-down interviews they do with each other where one guy in a quarter-zip asks another guy in a quarter-zip about his “process.” Uecker’s process was showing up, knowing the lineup, and being funny on purpose without making it the whole point. The whole point was the ballgame. Imagine.
Here is what Uecker understood that nobody under forty seems to: the broadcast is a window, not a mirror. You are pointing at something. You are not the something. When Uecker made a joke — and he made about four hundred thousand of them — the joke was always aimed outward, at himself, at his own .200 lifetime average, at the cheap seats in the back of the upper deck he pretended he was sitting in. He did not aim the joke at the audience and wait for them to laugh at themselves for getting the reference. There is a difference. The difference is approximately forty years of American culture.
My old coach, Sal DiMaggio, used to say that the mark of a professional was that you could not tell when he was having a bad day. Uecker was on the air for more than half a century and I could not tell you one game where he was phoning it in. Not one. And the Brewers, let us be honest, gave him ample material for phoning it in. Entire decades of material. He showed up for Robin Yount and he showed up for the 1998 club and he showed up for whatever was happening in July of 2003, and he sounded, every single time, like a man who was genuinely delighted to be telling you about a 2-1 count in the bottom of the sixth.
My grandson, who is eleven and a good kid despite everything working against him, asked me last year why old broadcasts sound “empty.” I said what do you mean empty. He said there’s nothing on the screen. No graphics crawling, no scorebug blinking, no split-screen of a guy in a studio in Bristol reacting to the pitch. I told him that’s what a ballgame used to look like, and the empty part was where your own brain went. He thought about that and then asked if he could have his iPad back. Fair enough. I take the small victories.
The thing I want to say about Uecker, and I am going to say it whether you want me to or not because this is my column, is that he was funny without being cruel, and that is the rarest combination in American life right now. Every comedian on a podcast is mean. Every sideline reporter has a brand. Every halftime show is a pitch deck. Uecker made fun of himself, of the beer, of the bratwurst, of the weather in April in Wisconsin, which deserves to be made fun of. He didn’t make fun of the players for being bad, and the players, believe me, were frequently bad.
Petey Corrigan, who you may remember from previous dispatches as the only man in our Thursday diner group who still subscribes to a physical newspaper, said the thing I wish I’d said. He said, “Uecker was the last guy who sounded like he worked for the team and not for himself.” That’s it. That’s the whole obituary. You can put down the pen. Everybody in a booth now is auditioning — for a network job, for a studio gig, for a line of merchandise, for a documentary about their own voice. Uecker was just calling the game.
I will allow that some of this is me being an old man yelling at a cloud-based subscription service, and I accept that charge without contesting it. But I would like the record to show that the cloud deserves some of the yelling. Nobody at ESPN is going to spend fifty-four years in one city. Nobody at FanDuel is going to develop an affection for a team so deep that their voice cracks in August. The whole architecture of modern sports media is designed to prevent a Bob Uecker from ever happening again, and then, when one of them dies, everybody at those same networks does a ninety-second package about what a treasure he was. They do not see the contradiction. They are not equipped to.
Ray called me back at noon. He’d been listening to old clips on the YouTube, which is something he recently learned how to do and which he now treats like a research library. He wanted to read me a line Uecker used to do about a juuust a bit outside. I said Ray, I know the line. He said I know you know the line, I’m reading it to you anyway. We sat on the phone for a minute and neither of us said anything, which, again, is allowed.
Rest him. Rest the voice. Rest the man who understood that the job was the job and not the platform for the job. They are not making any more of him, and the machinery that used to make him has been quietly dismantled while we were all arguing about whether a linebacker should have a skincare line.
Denise is bringing over a tuna casserole tonight. She says it’s from a cookbook her mother had, which, in this house, counts as a citation.