Jeff Levering pretty much knew his broadcast partner of 10 years would never call another game after his Milwaukee Brewers blew a late lead in a deciding Oct. 3 wild card game to the New York Mets. Levering was one of the very few even within the Brewers organization who knew about Bob Uecker’s two-year battle with small cell lung cancer, and it wasn’t looking good.
“That one had some sting on it,” were Ueck’s last words as a broadcaster.
You can hear the pain in Levering’s voice as he barely kept it together during his final sign-off of the 2024 season. “We will chat with you again in the spring,” he told heartbroken Brewers fans, just minutes after watching back-to-back lead-taking homers from Jake Bauers and Sal Frelick in the seventh inning go to waste. “You just never know what’s going to happen, folks. That’s why we’re all fans, and we all care. Because this game is the best. We’ll get through it somehow. We’ll have the offseason, and there will be baseball again in the spring.”
Baseball will be back in Milwaukee – today, on Opening Day – but without its voice.
The moment that final broadcast of 2024 was over, Uecker was already out of the booth. Levering just put his head down on the desk and cried.
Here’s the part the public doesn’t know.
Sign-offs
At the end of most every broadcast throughout Levering’s decade in radio and TV with the Brewers, when Uecker would leave for the day, he wouldn’t say anything but would pat his co-host on the shoulder as he exited the press box. To Levering, the pat always meant “You did a good job today.” (Levering admits to feeling a rush of anxiety whenever Uecker wouldn’t give him the pat, despite full-well knowing it most often would be an oversight rather than an insult from the celebrity broadcaster.)
On that final October broadcast, Uecker got up to leave with a few minutes left in the postgame show. A fellow Hall of Famer, Robin Yount, was helping Uecker up the stairs. Levering, fretting as he saw Ueck rise from his chair, feared he would never get a chance to say goodbye in the press box’s sacred air.
“Bob stands up. And he’s about ready to walk out of the booth for the last time,” Levering recalls; he remembers thinking to himself “What!? He’s going to leave right now? I can’t even do anything, I can’t say bye, I can’t do anything.”
But in just that moment, longtime Brewers radio producer-engineer Kent Sommerfeld miraculously had queued up a long highlight clip to be broadcast, the replay of Frelick’s homer. Levering calls it “Divine intervention.”
Levering quickly took off his headset and turned to Ueck. Uecker didn’t pat him on the shoulder this time or make some off-the-cuff quip. He stuck out his arm, and they shook hands.
Everyone in the booth – including Uecker, Yount, Uecker’s longtime partner Judy, Sommerfeld and Lane Grindle – were all crying or on the brink of it.
Another perspective
Grindle, Levering’s mirror in Brewers radio since 2016, doesn’t remember watching Uecker stand up or even shake Levering’s hand. He was too worried about what he would say to the legend for what at first seemed like the last time.
Grindle and Uecker had a nightly tradition where Grindle would take Uecker down the elevator before the two would commandeer a golf cart. They would drop Uecker off at his car, shooting the breeze the whole way as Uecker spoke from an endless trove of stories, before Grindle would make his way to his own vehicle and drive home.
On this day, with Yount and Judy, in the press box, Grindle figured he would say goodbye there.
“You’re coming with me,” Uecker said to Grindle, pointing a finger. Even at the end, Uecker respected the tradition.
The moment Grindle remembers most came a few minutes later.
Sitting in a private office adjacent to the dugout, for one of the few times in his life, Uecker wasn’t speaking. There was an odd-but-important-feeling silence in the air.
In the clubhouse, the team was mourning the end of the season. In here – with Grindle, Yount, star Christian Yelich, fellow broadcaster Josh Maurer and two of Uecker’s close friends who work behind the scenes within the organization: Director of Clubhouse Operations Tony Migliaccio and Senior Director of Security Randy Olewinski – there was an acceptance that this was probably the end of Mr. Baseball’s career.
“It was just kind of an emotional moment where nobody said anything,” Grindle recalls. “Nobody said ‘Hey, this is the end,’ but we all knew there was a really good chance it was … There was a lot of respect and appreciation for him and his legacy, and I think also an appreciation for everything he had gone through over the last two years to get himself to the ballpark and work as many games as he had.”
What Uecker is going to ‘hate’
When interviewed in February, Levering didn’t know what kind of tributes were in the works for the team’s first-ever home opener without Uecker, scheduled for March 31. What Levering did know is that Uecker “would hate it.”
“He would hate all the tributes. He would wave and he would appreciate it, and I think he’d be thankful for it, but he would not want to be a part of it.”
To Uecker, it should just be baseball. It’s always been baseball.
Levering visited Uecker at his home the day before he died. The night after he passed, Levering was scheduled to work a Big Ten basketball game. He called the game, a Maryland-Northwestern matchup that ended in an overtime buzzer-beater, making no mention of his friend. “That’s what he would want.”
