How the late, great Bob Uecker changed baseball movies forever

When “Major League” by David S. Coming into the multiplex on April 7, 1989, many people wrote it off as a professional baseball clone. Bull Durham Little League set. A wise-cracking veteran catcher (Tom Berenger) with bad knees looking down the barrel of forced retirement? Checks. A rookie pitcher (Charlie Sheen) with a flamethrower for an arm and no semblance of control? Checks. A superstitious baseball player (Dennis Haysbert) demands that a live chicken be sacrificed to get him out of a painful slump? Checks.

The mere presence of these familiar elements was enough for many of the nation’s critics to dismiss Major League as a slapdash comedy (Roger Ebert, who reviewed almost everything, skipped it entirely). Moviegoers didn’t agree. The film grossed $50 million in the United States on an $11 million budget, earning an A- CinemaScore before being turned into a home video/pay cable film. By the time the next baseball season rolled around, “Major League” was considered a complete, uncolored classic of the American pastime (it’s one of /The 30 Best Baseball Movies of All Time).

And this would never have happened if Ward hadn’t hired Bob Uecker to play Harry Doyle, the long-suffering, hard-drinking man.

The only people who didn’t consider Uecker an ideal choice as radio announcer for the team then known as the Cleveland Indians (the organization changed its name to the Guardians in 2021) were Milwaukee Brewers fans, who had been listening to “Mr. Baseball” call games for their team since 1971. But the baseball player The former pro who once shared the dugout with Milwaukee Braves greats Hank Aaron and Warren Spahn was bigger than the city and more than just a sports celebrity when he took over the role. Doyle was a star Several Miller Lite commercials In the 1980s, he played beloved TV dad George Owens on the long-running ABC sitcom “Mr. Belvedere.” He was also a fixture on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, where he built a reputation for being quick on his feet with perfect sarcasm.

There was nothing surprising about Okker stealing scene after scene in “Major League,” which may be why so many critics took the film for granted.

The “Major League” hook is as familiar as those aforementioned gags. Margaret Wetton plays a Las Vegas showgirl, who inherited Cleveland’s famous baseball team from her late husband. Not liking the depressed Midwestern city on Lake Erie or its famously bad winters, she forced the team’s front office to assemble a team of nobodies whose poor performance would torpedo attendance and allow her to move the organization to Miami. Basically, It’s “bad news” With higher stakes. As expected, this team of losers will band together out of pride, and end up in a winner-takes-all game with their archrival (in this case, the New York Yankees).

“Major League” works beautifully as a comedy formula about last-chance misfits, but even with first-rate performances from the entire ensemble, it would play like a cookie-cutter studio programmer without Uecker. Although Ward does a fairly strong job of conveying how miserable it was to be a Cleveland baseball fan in the 1980s (the opening credits scored to Randy Newman’s “Burn On” are very effective), his gallows humor is Which lets die-hards come alive season after season of heartbreak and absurdity loud and clear when Doyle and his colorless man Monty are introduced during the opening day game. Uecker may be a Milwaukee native, but he’s been around the game long enough to know that special kind of self-deprecating malaise that passes from generation to generation in Cleveland. And in his first scene, he makes sure everyone in the audience feels like they’re saying sorry Rocky colavito trade Since their birth.

Doyle Okker is necessarily a liar. On the outside, he’s a lively man, who calls the game eloquently and, despite his many years in the cabin, has a convincing ability to surprise. The line drive to deep center still holds the secret of distance for him. At least, it would be if anyone in this lousy version of Cleveland could put enough wood on the ball.

Instead, Doyle has to find fierce poetry in the first-time at-bat of Willie Mays Hayes (Wesley Snipes), a complete unknown who inexplicably turns an accidental dodgeball into second base. “Hey, that’s a hard shot to the hole,” Doyle shouted as the player hit the weak ball. When Hayes beats the shot, Doyle relentlessly adds a color of BS to the play by saying, “Hey, give Rudy credit for sacrificing his body on that bat. This guy’s got a family to think about.”

It will be this kind of season for Doyle because it has always been this kind of season. But he’ll make it seem like professional baseball is played here because his salary demands it. How can he bear the horror? By pouring several sticks of Jack Daniels into a paper cup and lying some more. Doyle is dying inside, but he’ll never let his dwindling group of listeners know that.

Uecker’s best moment comes later in this game when he faces the wayward fastball terror that is Sheen’s Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn. When the rookie pitcher’s first pitch rushes out of reach of Beringer’s Jake Taylor, Doyle delivers the most quotable line in the movie: “Juuuuust a bit out.” It’s a great laugh line that’s drowned out by the funnier follow-up “He tried the angle and missed.”

Thirty-six years later, sportscasters of all stripes are still quoting or paraphrasing Doyle — and Uecker in general. But you can only get away with this kind of insidious lying if you are the focus of attention of your listeners. It’s a dying skill, one that had never been shared with sports fans before Major League. Doyle was an incorrigible fabulist for foolish believers. There is nobility in loving a team that gives you nothing but heartache, and believing that everything will work out when it never does. Bob Uecker, who passed away today at the age of 90, encouraged us to believe it because, deep down, I believe he believed it too.