MILWAUKEE (AP) – Bob Uecker wasn’t much of a ballplayer, but even back in his playing days, he sure talked a good game.

Johnny Logan, who starred at shortstop for the old Milwaukee Braves, knew the third-string catcher with a .199 career batting average had a big future in baseball.

“He would sit on the bench and announce the game as we were playing,” Logan recalled. “The only bad thing was nobody was listening to him but us.”

Whether he was in the dugout or the bullpen, on the bus or in the air, Uecker entertained his teammates with play-by-play imitations of Harry Caray and other famous radio announcers.

“Not that I was practicing for any job,” Uecker said. “I was just doing it to screw around.”

Who ever would have thought it was the beginning of a Hall of Fame career?

“Not I,” said Uecker, who will be inducted into the broadcasters’ wing at Cooperstown on Sunday. “Never in a million years.”

Uecker’s voice became part of the national landscape in 1971 when Bud Selig hired him to broadcast games for the Milwaukee Brewers in his hometown.

Uecker’s blend of quick wit and homespun wisdom also made him a star at the movies, on TV shows and in beer commercials as he became a cultural icon.

He is known by millions as Mr. Baseball, Harry Doyle – the oddball Indians announcer in the 1989 blockbuster “Major League” movies – and the Miller Lite front-row guy who couldn’t catch a break. He also appeared as a character on the sitcom “Mr. Belvedere.”

“I don’t mind. I’m part of American folklore, I guess,” Uecker said. “But I’m not a Hollywood guy. Baseball and broadcasting are in my blood.”

You can bet his acceptance speech Sunday will be packed with self-deprecating humor drawn from his run-of-the-mill playing career that became such fruitful fodder for his shtick.

“I’m not going to do anything serious,” he said with a chuckle.

Uecker’s love for laughter used to get him in trouble and now it’s helped land him in the Hall of Fame.

“My dad was in school more than I was because I was screwing around all the time,” Uecker said. “I always had the ability to get up in front of people and make them laugh.”

And his playing career with the Braves, Cardinals and Phillies provided his best material for his second career as a funnyman:

• “I signed with the Milwaukee Braves for $3,000. That bothered my dad at the time because he didn’t have that kind of dough. But he eventually scraped it up.”

• “Career highlights? I had two. I got an intentional walk from Sandy Koufax, and I got out of a rundown against the Mets.”

• “In 1962, I was named Minor League Player of the Year. It was my second season in the bigs.”

• “When I came up to bat with three men on and two outs in the ninth, I looked in the other team’s dugout and they were already in street clothes.”

Uecker isn’t just a comedian. He’s first and foremost a radio man there to tell the story.

“I don’t think anyone wants to hear somebody screwing around when you got a good game going,” Uecker said. “I think people see ‘Major League’ and they think Harry Doyle and figure that’s what Bob Uecker does. I do that sometimes, I do. But when we’ve got a good game going, I don’t mess around.”

And he doesn’t rip players or managers, either.

“I don’t make fun of anybody,” he said.

Except himself.

“I never really had much to shout about as far as a player goes. So, I did the self-deprecating stuff,” Uecker said.

Uecker won’t take any shots at players because he knows how hard the game is. He won a World Series title with the Cardinals in 1964, “and the next year we finished sixth with the same team.”

“I probably played more,” he said. “Maybe that was why.”

Like any good storyteller, Uecker has a knack for embellishment.

“The key to Bob is he’s 99.9 percent true,” Logan said.

Uecker doesn’t disagree.

At a recent game, Uecker went on and on about his pregame conversation with Colorado second baseman Ronnie Belliard, who used to play for the Brewers, and how he missed Milwaukee and its fans.

When radio booth partner Jim Powell asked him what else Belliard had to say, Uecker replied: “I’m just making this up. I didn’t talk to Belliard.”

What sets Uecker apart, said Brewers president Ulice Payne, is the way he mixes in his intelligence with his ingenuity.

“Bob was a catcher, like many of your best managers, Mike Scioscia, Joe Torre. Catchers have a difference sense of the game,” Payne said. “That’s the key to his popularity: people learn when they’re listening to Bob Uecker.”

And they laugh, too.

AP-ES-07-24-03 2104EDT