So let’s go back to the end of the 2023 season. The Brewers once again made slamming your hand in a car door seem preferable to playoff baseball as they got swept by the Diamondbacks. The next morning, I saw this on Twitter:
Bob Uecker’s sign-off as the Brewers season comes to an end: “We’ll get together again.” pic.twitter.com/upRiru5q1G
— Drake Bentley (@DrakeBentleyMJS) October 5, 2023
I wasn’t listening to the radio broadcast that night so I didn’t hear this in real time, but the second I saw this post and heard the tone in his voice I thought, ‘was that a sign off for his career?’ It just had that feeling of finality.
Well, as with most things in my life, I pondered that for about 45 seconds and then moved on to something else, completely forgetting about it.
Until I saw the above post on the Brewers’ social media pages yesterday. I had heard rumblings from Spring Training that Uecker wasn’t in attendance for any Cactus League games, which is unusual. And that conversation seemed to pick up steam last week when the Brewers announced their TV and radio broadcast teams without much mention of Mr. Baseball. Which ultimately lead us that post on Wednesday.
Now Ueck has been primarily working home games (with maybe a few Chicago games mixed in) for many years, but the way Schlesinger’s quote reads, he’s going to be scaling way back from even the ‘just home games’ schedule as well.
Which is perfectly fine! As a lifelong Brewer fan, I certainly rather hear Uecker call a game than not. But the man is 90 years old. He still sounds great, but I’m sure the demands of even an 81-game schedule takes its toll. He’s given all of us more entertainment over his 5+ decades in broadcasting than any single fan base deserves. He owes us nothing.
So my message is this: Cherish this man. I think we all do, but maybe it needs reiterating with yesterday’s news. Who knows how many games he’ll do this season. It might be 60, it might be 40, it might be 20, hell it might just be Opening Day, no one is certain. But rest assured that for every single game he calls this season, I will have the radio on. It feels like we’re not going to get much more Mr. Baseball and I don’t want to miss a single self-deprecating joke, or story (real or made up) about a bygone era of baseball.
PS: Can we please, PLEASE, get a World Series title for this man. PLEASE.
Double PS: Here’s some fun stuff:
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