Baseball has seen plenty of characters, but surely the all-time leader in laughs above replacement has to be the unparalleled Bob Uecker.
Dubbed “Mr. Baseball” by none other than the King of Late Night, Johnny Carson, Uecker didn’t confine his wit, antics and self-deprecating humor to the ballpark or the game broadcast. His IMDB page cites 18 acting credits, all of them coming after his 50th birthday.
So let’s look back at some of his notable cultural moments away from the ballfield.
Uecker sat down beside Johnny Carson’s desk dozens of times, going back at least as far as 1971, the year he went from a scout in the Brewers’ front office to their radio booth. In an 11-minute appearance, Uecker doesn’t once crack a smile or deviate from his deadpan delivery, yet he keeps Carson and the studio audience in stitches.
Whether trudging up the steps of the upper deck or bouncing down the aisle toward the field, who hasn’t uttered one of Uecker’s most famous lines? “I must be in the front rowwww,” he said in anticipation in an iconic 1984 ad.
A year earlier, another ad featured the former catcher in a bar scene where he gets a fellow patron — played by John Goodman! — to buy him a beer after saying he was an ex-ballplayer … but not Bob Uecker.
In 1984, Uecker hosted the second episode of SNL’s 10th season. In his monologue, he talked about going back to St. Louis to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Cardinals’ 1964 world championship. “I got out of the cab, and there’s a statue of me outside the St. Louis ballpark,” he said. “It’s a little screwed up – they have me batting left-handed; I was a right-handed batter, but the uniform and everything else was the same. And right on the bottom, the guy’s name, big letters, some guy named Stan the Man. I guess he made it. He did a beautiful job on it.”
In one of his sketches, he plays a father coaching the Little League team of his son, played by Billy Crystal — who is told he’s being released.
This ABC series ran for six seasons, 1985-90, and 117 episodes. Uecker played George Owens, a sportswriter-turned-sportscaster and married father of three living in the Pittsburgh suburbs who butts heads with the family’s British butler.
In 1986, Uecker had a cameo in this series, which starred Tony Danza as a former ballplayer and single dad who takes a job as a live-in housekeeper for a divorced advertising executive. The scene, in which Uecker converses with Danza’s daughter, played by Alyssa Milano, is a reference to Uecker’s “front row” Miller Lite ad.
Who but Bob Uecker could play the role of the derisive broadcaster Harry Doyle in this three-movie franchise? In fact, Uecker essentially created the character. “It was all ad-libbed,” he once said. “They gave me an outline and said, ‘Be this guy.’ I could do whatever I wanted.”
2003 Ford C. Frick Award speech
OK, this may be a stretch for a list of Uecker’s top moments in pop culture because it’s related to his life in baseball and as a broadcaster, but it’s an 18-minute stand-up set that has Hall of Famers like Gary Carter, Eddie Murray and Yogi Berra in stitches. You’ll be laughing in less time than a between-innings break.