t a m i 🦩 c a b r e r a

Milwaukee just won the World Series for the first time in the history of the franchise. Go back to the first night of it, and the man they sent out to throw the first pitch. He walked to the mound wearing another man's jacket. A plaid sport coat. One of Bob Uecker's actual ones, off the rack in his closet. Robin 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 out 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. Outside the ballpark people were setting Miller Lite cans down at the foot of the Uecker statue. 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. He finished with 3,142 hits and all of them came in one uniform. 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. Be straight about what tonight is and is not. Robin Yount is not a World Series champion. He got one chance at it, in 1982, and it got away in a seventh game, and he retired in 1993 without another. Bob Uecker did not get one here either. He passed in January of last year at 90, after 54 seasons calling Brewers games, and the team won it twenty-one months later. The booth has his name on it now, which is not the same as having him in it. So the two men who gave this city the most got the least out of tonight. But on the first night of the whole thing, one of them walked to the mound carrying the coat of the other, took it off, and showed 40,000 people whose name he had on his back. Milwaukee waited 57 years. Those two waited longest.