chris gollnick

Robin Yount walked out to throw the first pitch at the first Brewers World Series game in 44 years, and he was wearing another man's jacket. A plaid sport coat. One of Bob Uecker's actual ones, off the rack in his closet. Yount is the one who asked. When he found out he had the first pitch, he went to Brewers broadcaster Lane Grindle and asked whether it would be appropriate to wear a plaid jacket in honor of Ueck. Grindle told him he thought it would be incredible. Then Grindle went a step further and asked Uecker's family whether the crew could borrow the real coats. They said yes right away. So Yount walked to the mound in Bob Uecker's jacket. And then on the mound he took it off. Underneath was a Brewers jersey. Number 19. UECK across the back. The entire radio crew wore the coats too. Josh Maurer got the one Uecker wore in the Miller Lite commercial with Whitey Ford and John Goodman, which is also the coat he is wearing on the cover of Catcher in the Wry. The engineer, Kent Sommerfeld, wore the one from the commercial Uecker did with John Madden. Outside the ballpark, people were setting Miller Lite cans down at the foot of the Uecker statue. Ryan Braun got the crowd to shout for Ueck before the game. Now understand why it had to be Yount. He played 20 seasons and every single one of them was in Milwaukee. He was the starting shortstop on Opening Day of 1974, at 18 years old, and he did not stop until 1993. Bob Uecker had been in that radio booth since 1971. Which means Uecker called every game Robin Yount ever played. All 2,856 of them. And in 1982, the last time this franchise got here, Yount was the Most Valuable Player in the American League. He hit .414 in that World Series with a home run and six runs batted in. Milwaukee lost it in seven games. Yount finished with 3,142 hits, all of them in a Milwaukee uniform, and he won a second Most Valuable Player award in 1989 after a shoulder problem moved him to the outfield. Only two men before him had ever won it at two different positions. Uecker did not make it to this one. He passed in January of last year at 90 years old, after 54 seasons calling Brewers games, and the team got back to the World Series twenty-one months later. The broadcast booth has his name on it now, which is not the same as having him in it. Milwaukee beat Tampa Bay 3 to 2. A man who gave one city his entire playing career walked to the mound carrying the coat of the man who described all of it, took the coat off, and showed everybody whose name he had on his back.