JUUUUST A BIT OUTSIDE. Bob Uecker during his playing days with the Eau Claire Bears in 1957 (left) and throwing out the first pitch at a Milwaukee Brewers game in 2011 (right).  (Photo credits: Background by Andrea Paulseth, left courtesy Chippewa Valley Museum, right by Steve Paluch / CC BY-SA 3.0)

Before he was the voice of the Milwaukee Brewers for 54 seasons, a World Series winner, the star of Major League and Mr. Belvedere, and before anyone thought to call him “Mr. Baseball,” Bob Uecker was a catcher for the minor league Eau Claire Bears making $250 a month.

Uecker, who passed away last week at age 90, played parts of two seasons – 1956 and 1957 – for the Bears, who at the time were a minor league affiliate of the Milwaukee Braves. While he may not have been the most famous future Brave to play in Eau Claire – that honor would go to home-run king Hank Aaron – he was probably the funniest. In his 1982 autobiography Catcher in the Wry (Get it?) and during his endless hours of broadcast commentary, Uecker never tired of poking fun at his own inadequacies as a ballplayer. And, naturally, some of those tales took place in Eau Claire.

“I joined my first professional team, Eau Claire, in the Northern League, in the late spring of 1956,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I was twenty-one, just out of the service, making $250 a month and six dollars a day on the road for meal money – just enough to keep you from gnawing on the table leg in your favorite cafe.”

This Eau Claire Bears 1957 team photo includes Uecker, third from right in the first row. (Photo via Chippewa Valley Museum)

A couple of other Uecker tales are part of the Chippewa River Trolley Co.’s “signature tour,” as presented by George House: One story was about the landlady who would lock him out of her boarding house if he returned after curfew (forcing the ballplayer to sleep outdoors a few times). Another took place during spring training, when a heavy snow fell on Eau Claire. While the team couldn’t practice on the field, the manager called the city and had them plow out the parking lot. So the team practiced on the wintery parking lot in Carson Park for the week. That was Bob’s most lasting memory of Eau Claire: Cold, snow, and hitting very, very hard ground balls!

“I enjoyed it up there. They were nice people and had a nice park. Any guy would have fun,” Uecker reminisced about Eau Claire to the Leader-Telegram in 1982. “It was my first year of pro ball and I wanted to go as far as I could. The Braves had 13 farm clubs at that time. There was always somebody looking for your job. I don’t think anyone could predict where they would end up.”

That being said, some of his teammates thought Uecker had a future in show business. “He was unbelievable,” Bears teammate Doug Smith told the Leader-Telegram in 1982. “You could tell at that time he had a future in the field he has gone into. He had the gift of gab. We all said he would end up in the entertainment field.”

Ultimately, after stints with minor league teams in Eau Claire, Boise, Wichita, Evansville, Eau Claire (again!), Atlanta, Boise (again!), Atlanta (again!), Jacksonville, Indianapolis, and Louisville – “I was in more hotel rooms than the Gideon Bible,” he quipped – Uecker was finally promoted to the Milwaukee Braves in 1962. His batting average over six years in the majors was .200 – just above the .171 he hit in his first season in Eau Claire. As Uecker himself joked, “Sporting goods companies offered to pay me not to endorse their products.”