2020 will be Bill Schroeder’s 20th year in the TV booth for the Milwaukee Brewers. During Spring Training and the early weeks of the season though, fans will have to get used to seeing much less of him than before. Schroeder is recovering from heart surgery and will reduce his work and travel load for the first half of the season.
“I went in for my annual prostate exam/physical, and Dr. [Craig] Young, the Brewers’ doctor, did a pretty good job of identifying that my heart was skipping beats and it was irregular, and my blood pressure was like 170 over something. And they took it again and it was down to like 160 over something, it was still ridiculously high,” he told MLB.com’s Adam McCalvy. “So he called Dr. [James] Kleska, he did an electrocardiogram, and found that I was born with a birth defect in my valve. I had a bicuspid valve. You know, your heart has three flaps, valves, and two of them were fused together when I was born.”
Schroeder’s current plan is to cut back on Spring Training work. He will also skip several early season road trips. The Brewers and Fox Sports Wisconsin have lined up a number of former players to serve as analysts for those games. Jeff Cirillo, Geoff Jenkins, Jerry Augustine, and Doug Jenkins are all scheduled to work during the season.
