Hall Of Fame Taps Ten Announcers As Candidates For 2024 Frick Award

Ten top baseball announcers will vie for the 2024 Ford C. Frick award, presently annually by the Baseball Hall of Fame for excellence in broadcasting. Eight of the nominees are still working, while one is retired and another is deceased.

Candidates include Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper of the San Francisco Giants, Tom Hamilton of the Cleveland Guardians, Ken Korach of the Oakland Athletics, Joe Castiglione of the Boston Red Sox, Gary Cohen of the New York Mets, Dan Schulman of the Toronto Blue Jays and ESPN, retired French-language broadcaster Jacques Doucet of the Blue Jays, long-time network voice Joe Buck, and the late Ernie Johnson, Sr. of the Atlanta Braves.

This is the fourth straight year the ballot blends local and national voices active in 1994, the year baseball transitioned into three-divisional play and inaugurated the wild-card era.

Next year’s ballot will be limited to broadcasters whose careers ended before the wild-card began.

For the Classes of 2026 and 2027, the ballot will again feature local and national voices active in the wild-card era whose careers extended into 1994 or continued after that date. A pre-wild-card ballot is scheduled for 2027 as the cycle repeats.

Each ballot contains 10 names, with at least one of them a foreign-language broadcaster.

To be considered, a candidate must have a “commitment to excellence, quality of broadcasting abilities, reverence within the game, popularity with fans, and recognition by peers,” according to election rules.

The winner will be announced Dec. 6 during the Baseball Winter Meetings in Nashville and honored during the Class of 2024 Induction Weekend in Cooperstown July 19-22.

To be considered, candidates must have at least 10 years of continuous major-league broadcast service with a ballclub, network, or combination of the two.

Castiglione began his career with the Red Sox in 1983 – after he already worked for the Brewers and Indians (now Guardians).

Kuiper, a former second baseman, began with the Giants in 1986 but has been paired with Krukow, a one-time pitcher in the major leagues, in the broadcast booth since 1990.

Cohen, a graduate of Columbia, joined the Mets in 1989, moved to the new SNY in 2005, and was inducted into the team’s Hall of Fame just a few months ago.

Hamilton has been the main baseball radio voice in Cleveland since 1990, four years before Buck began broadcasting for FOX. The son of long-time broadcaster Jack Buck, who won the Frick award in 1987, Joe Buck broadcast the World Series for 25 years.

Schulman, also a finalist for the Frick award in 2021, is a Toronto native who has long been the team’s top English-language broadcast voice.

A bilingual Montreal native, Doucet handled the French broadcasts of the Blue Jays from 2011-2022 before retiring.

Because the demise of the Montreal Expos created a baseball vacuum for French-speaking fans, the Blue Jays continued the tradition of broadcasting their games in both languages.

With the Athletics likely to shift from Oakland to Las Vegas, the broadcasting future is uncertain for Korach, who had been the team’s top radio voice since succeeding the legendary Lon Simmons in 1996. He has written two books, Holy Toledo: Lessons From Bill King, and Oakland A’s: If These Walls Could Talk, with Susan Slusser.

Korach is a member of the Nevada Broadcasters Hall of Fame, the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame of Northern California, and the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame.

A former pitcher, Ernie Johnson spent nearly three decades teaming with Pete Van Wieren and Skip Caray as the voices of the Atlanta Braves. His son is still heard during baseball broadcasts on TBS, the Atlanta-based SuperStation created by former Braves owner Ted Turner.

The Frick Award is part of an awards presentation separate from the Hall of Fame player inductions but part of the same weekend. Its ballot is created by a special committee of historians, while another committee picks the winner.

Mel Allen, best-known for his long tenure with the New York Yankees, was the first winner when the award was established in 1978.