Sunday, February 23

PHOENIX -- Like they’ve done so many times before, Jeff Levering and Lane Grindle will settle into the home radio booth at American Family Fields of Phoenix to call Saturday’s Cactus League opener between the Brewers and the Reds. Counting Spring Training, regular season and postseason games over the past 10 years, they’ve already called more than 800 contests without Bob Uecker -- either when the Brewers are on the road or, more commonly over past few seasons, at home when Uecker was too exhausted from cancer treatments to work. 

But this won’t be any other game. It’s the first time the Brewers will take the field since Uecker passed away in January from small cell lung cancer.

“He’s been on my mind every day for a long time,” Grindle said. “It’s going back to last Spring Training, to be honest with you, knowing everything he was putting himself through so he could put himself in the booth and be part of Brewers baseball. There’s a finality to it now. You know that you don’t have another game with Ueck on the horizon, and that’s hard to accept. 

“A lot of this is going to be taking it one day at a time, one inning at a time. We’re going to have a day where we sit around and have dinner and tell some Ueck stories and we’re all smiling as we put the headsets on, and then there are going to be days where we’re really missing his presence, days where we really need him. There’s no template that was left behind. We’re going to have to just show up every day and go to work like Ueck would have.”

That was precisely Levering’s strategy as he pondered what to say when he comes on the air on the Brewers Radio Network at 2 p.m. CT. He had not prepared any remarks as of Friday morning and did not plan to, opting instead to let the broadcast genuinely flow. 

“I’ve thought about this now for the last month, I’m just going to try to channel what Bob would say when we open up the season,” Levering said. I’m sure we’ll chat about the heaviness of doing a game and not having Bob around, but he would say this day is about the Brewers and not about him.”

• Yelich honors Uecker during Brewers’ photo day

That’s going to be difficult, knowing what Uecker meant to their broadcast team, which includes longtime engineer Kent Sommerfeld and the third play-by-play man, Josh Maurer, and other men whose names rarely made it on air. Levering and Grindle both mentioned longtime Brewers medical director Roger Caplinger, director of clubhouse operations Tony Migliaccio and senior director of security Randy Olewinski for all they did to get Uecker to the ballpark and to the microphone each day, especially near the end of his life.

“Those guys are the real MVPs, man,” Grindle said. “We all benefited from it. The fans surely benefitted from it. Jeff and I certainly benefited from it because we got to work more games with him.”

It is not lost on Levering and Grindle that there is a huge swath of fans who do not know Brewers baseball without Uecker, the onetime catcher who grew up in Milwaukee, played for the Milwaukee Braves, failed as a scout and then found a home in the radio booth alongside Merle Harmon and Tom Collins beginning in 1971.

Sometimes, the worst ballgames were the best broadcasts with Uecker, who could tell a story like few in baseball history. Spring Training exhibitions were a perfect time for his humor to carry the show, including the games at the club’s long-ago complex in Sun City, Ariz., where Ueck would call the action while shirtless and perched on the roof of the press box. 

“After the fifth inning when the line changes happened, he would throw up his pen and go, ‘I don’t know what’s going on. You take the scorebook and call the game!’” Levering said with a laugh. “We’ll miss those stories in the eighth and ninth innings where we talked about everything but the game.

“But he loved being here and he loved the team. He loved showing up at the ballpark, going around the clubhouse and then going up to the booth and going, ‘Let’s go!’ We’re going to miss that.” 

Joey Ortiz will get the first start at shortstop and Brice Turang will stick at second base for Saturday’s exhibition opener, but don’t read too much into that, said manager Pat Murphy. 

The Brewers haven’t finalized how they will configure the infield in the absence of shortstop Willy Adames, who signed a free agent deal with the Giants over the winter. Saturday’s lineup reflects the most likely scenario; Ortiz shifting from third base to shortstop and Turang staying put at second, where he won not only the NL Gold Glove Award for that position, but the Platinum Glove Award as the league’s top overall defender. In that scenario, Oliver Dunn, Andruw Monasterio and perhaps Tyler Black and Caleb Durbin would see time at third. 

“We haven’t made a decision,” Murphy said. “The first day of Spring Training doesn’t indicate jack [squat]. I don’t know if you know Jack. But we haven’t made a decision. When we make the decision, I swear to God, I’m going to tell you.” 

Murphy made clear how much he values Dunn, who made last year’s Opening Day roster but was eventually sent to the Minors with a .597 OPS and then missed extended time with a back injury. 

“He’s one of our most talented players, period,” Murphy said. “He’s got a chance to be a great defender at third.” 

Murphy said he aims to get Dunn a lot of at-bats this spring as he catches up from last year’s lost time. That will help the Brewers assess how to assemble the other pieces on the infield. 

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