PHOENIX -- Christian Yelich moved from station to station early Friday morning with a baseball bat on his shoulder. It was the Brewers’ photo day, a Spring Training rite of passage that produces the pictures you see all season long on baseball cards, on stadium scoreboards, in wire service stories and everywhere you look up statistics on the Internet.
The bat was an important part of Yelich’s uniform this year. Louisville Slugger produced it for last year’s Player’s Weekend, and it went unused because Yelich was down with a back injury. One side of the bat has an image of Yelich's late friend, Bob Uecker, the legendary broadcaster who passed away last month after calling 54 years of Brewers games on radio. The other side had the start of Uecker’s catch phrase for home runs:
Get up! Get out of here!!
Yelich still can’t quite believe he’s gone.
“You remember the stories he would tell,” Yelich said after making the photo rounds. “That’s the stuff you’re really going to miss because no one else can tell stories like that. But what a life, right?”
Uecker’s memory is everywhere at this camp, from the “Ueck” sign out front of American Family Fields of Phoenix along with the uniform numbers of other legends like Hank Aaron, Robin Yount, Jackie Robinson and more. The grounds crew painted Uecker’s autograph in the grass behind home plate in the main stadium, where the Brewers will host the Reds in their Cactus League opener on Saturday afternoon.
Yelich won’t play in the opener, but he’s right on schedule in his recovery from last year’s back surgery. You almost certainly won't see him use the special Uecker bat in a game, since it’s one of only a handful in existence. Last year, Yelich gifted one to Uecker.
“What a good life. A great life, 90 years,” Yelich said. “We should all be so fortunate.”