Weekend wrap: Vin Scully isn’t retiring just yet; new locales for GameDay; praise for Amy Trask

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Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports media:

Vin Scully 1: Steve Dilbeck of the Los Angeles Times has Scully clarifying his statements on plans beyond 2014.

Slow breaths now, find you inner calm, think gentle breezes through the pines.

Vin Scully has not announced next season will be his last.

Which doesn’t mean it might not be, but that’s the same as it’s been for several years now.  Scully, 85, said he will do his annual evaluation next summer and determine if he wants to come back for another year.

“I look at each year as possibly my last,” Scully said. “Next year will be no different. It all boils down to come July or August, how I feel physically. I’ll look at how many mistakes I’ve made and if they’re coming for me yet, and how I feel.”

The legendary broadcaster has already agreed to return for a record 65th season next spring, but in a recent interview with KPCC he sounded like next year could be his last.

“I wasn’t making a declaration,” Scully said. “I guess it was misconstrued. Each year is my last, until the next one. I never say yes or no.”

Vin Scully 2: Tom Hoffarth in the Los Angeles Daily has a Q/A with the legend.

Q: You’ve talked about the many reasons for wanting to come back for your 65th season next year, feeding off that energy and enthusiasm that you’ve seen on the field. You pick up on all that?
A: Yeah, I really do. I’ve really enjoyed the games at home, with the crowds so enthusiastic and high strung. So marvelously excited. I’ve always loved the roar of the crowd, I’ve said that my entire life. And this year, the crowds at Dodger Stadium have been making the kind of noise they made there when the team won the World Series in 1988. And then you look in the dugout, and these guys are just having fun. It’s really a wonderful experience. I don’t anything but sit there and absorb it.

Vin Scully, 3: Can’t get enough Vin, right? Chuck Culpepper in Sports on Earth writes it’s still all about preparation for Scully.

He will turn 86 in November. He will start his 65th season as the voice of the Dodgers next April. He lives with the abiding love of a sprawling metropolis. He has gone from Gil Hodges and Duke Snider and Roy Campanella all the way to Yasiel Puig, whom he can cite as “a study all by himself,” comparable to none, with “his unbridled joy of playing, his enthusiasm, his recklessness.” Yet as another season depletes toward Game 162 and, in this Dodger year, beyond, Vin Scully still totes around a healthy fear of unpreparedness.

“Well, you can see what I’m doing and you can see all these notes, and this is a highlight pencil,” he says. “And it’s one of the things you have to do, because you’re overwhelmed with minutiae, and so I go through all this and I highlight a few things that I want to use on the air. So that at a glance, I will see, ‘Oh, I thought I would use this, so I highlighted this.’ But the problem with this is you start looking and you’re liable to miss a play on the field, and that of course is a killer, so in a sense you’re being lured onto the rocks by the Lorelei, you know, so you try not to do that.”

GameDay: Joe Lucia of Awful Announcing says GameDay needs to go to more new locations, such as it is doing by going to Northwestern Saturday for the first time since 1995.

GameDay going to larger sites is really more of a statement about the current landscape of college football. Over the last season and a half, GameDay has gone to SEC schools seven times. Three of those games have involved Florida, and two each have involved Texas A&M, LSU, Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia. Overkill much? Well, those are all perennial powers that are ranked in the top ten, so it makes sense for GameDay to go to those sites.

But last year, things just got to be too much. Florida was featured (albeit on the road both times) in back to back weeks, and three times over a seven week period. South Carolina appeared twice in three weeks. Notre Dame appeared twice in three weeks, and three times over a seven week span. USC and Oregon have hosted a combined eight GameDays since 2008, while the rest of the Pac-12 has hosted a total of four – and one of those game when Utah was in the Mountain West. In case you’re curious, Oregon was the road team in all three of those Pac-12 conference games.

Blown coverage: Amanda Rykoff of Awful Announcing says TBS dropped the ball by failing to show the dramatic pregame festivities at Pittsburgh Tuesday night.

TBS, one of MLB’s three broadcast partners for the postseason, did not show the traditional pre-game player introductions, National Anthem or ceremonial first pitch before Pittsburgh’s 6-2 win over the Cincinnati Reds. Let that wash over you again: there was no television coverage of what should have been — and was — some of the most compelling drama of the evening.

This was the best story in baseball and I, along with most interested observers, could not wait to see how the Pirates and their fans celebrated the return of postseason baseball. As 8 o’clock on the east coast approached, I kept waiting for TBS to leave the pre-game studio show with Keith Olbermann, Mark DeRosa, Pedro Martinez and Dirk Hayhurst to bring us the on-field player introductions, National Anthem and ceremonial first pitch. It never happened.

Amy Trask: Tom Hoffarth of the Los Angeles Daily News says Trask is shining in her new role as studio analyst for CBS Sports Network’s NFL pregame show.

In the TV business, she may call herself “an undrafted rookie free agent.” But having her on the CBS roster should already make other networks wonder why their scouting departments didn’t pluck her up first.

“It’s very liberating after all these years with a team to now speak on things where I’m accountable to me,” Trask said from her San Francisco home office Wednesday. “I’m also coming to the realization that sometimes I’m not necessarily best at following direction. But it’s also nice to work as a group of very collaborative individuals.”

Pedro: Richard Deitsch at SI.com talks to Pedro Martinez about working as a studio analyst for TBS during the playoffs.

Martinez said he auditioned on Aug. 17 at Turner’s studios in Atlanta on a panel with Olbermann, Gary Sheffield and Bobby Valentine, with Turner production executives putting the three potential studio analysts through different game situations over a 120-minute tryout. Turner Sports executives liked what they heard from Martinez and let his agent know he had landed the job. What does he want baseball viewers to come away with after watching him?

“First the right facts, and then hopefully a lesson on some of the things that players go through during a season,” said Martinez, 41. “Hopefully, this will be teaching moment for the fans and kids who are watching. I want to educate you on the different aspects of the game.”

“He has the great knowledge how to pitch, but unlike me, he pitched at the highest, highest level anyone has ever pitched,” said Turner Sports MLB analyst Ron Darling. “He also has such a great personality. He has such a love for the game. He’s an interesting person and I think he will bring all of that to the booth.”

Premier League: Richard Sandomir of the New York Times reports that the Premier League is paying off for NBC.

So far, the formula is working. NBCSN’s 22 telecasts have been seen by an average of 391,000 viewers, 70 percent better than the average game last season on Fox Soccer, which carried most of the games, and ESPN and ESPN2, which broadcast about one game a week in a licensing deal. NBCSN, however, has about twice as many subscribers as Fox Soccer. More important, at least to NBC, is that NBCSN’s daily viewership from Aug. 17 to Sept. 22 swelled 67 percent, to 77,000 viewers.

That is still a fraction of ESPN’s 1.2 million in that period and fewer than the month-old Fox Sports 1’s 121,000. But the highs are getting higher. Last Sunday afternoon, 852,000 viewers watched Manchester City trounce Manchester United, 4-1, in one of the Premier League’s marquee early-season matches. That was the biggest audience so far on NBCSN.

John Guppy, a veteran soccer executive who founded Gilt Edge Soccer Marketing, said, “What they’ve done — and it’s not that Fox didn’t do it, but maybe it comes across more directly to consumers — is they’ve made the Premier League feel special and important.”

ESPN 3D: Fang’s Bites notes that ESPN 3D, which started with much fanfare, went dark on Monday.

The viewership for 3-D was so small, only an estimated 115,000 people were watching 3-D programming at one time, that it didn’t register with Nielsen for significant ratings data. By the time of this year’s Consumer Electronic Show, it was apparent that 3-D TV was on its deathbed. Television manufacturers were now pointing to the “next big thing” in the industry, 4K high definition which is even sharper than the current high definition displays.

However, as 3-D TV cost an average $1,500 extra for consumers, in hard economic times, it was difficult to convince buyers to shell out the extra cash to go to the third dimension.

 

Jim Kaat: Quick-pitch master on how baseball needs to pick up the pace

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My latest column for the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana features a chat with Jim Kaat on my biggest complaint: The numbing length of baseball games.

*******

I say to Jim Kaat that he still could pitch a game in two hours, 15 minutes these days.

“I don’t know about that,” Kaat laughed.

Kaat is right. Make it two-and-a-half hours. After all, Kaat is 74.

Nearly 40 years ago, anything over two hours for a game Kaat started was considered a marathon. In 1974, Kaat, then 35, used a quick-pitch approach to revive his career with back-to-back 20-win seasons with the White Sox. He would get the ball and throw it in virtually the same motion.

“The umps loved me and the vendors hated me,” Kaat said.

Here’s why: On May 31, 1975, Kaat and the Sox lost a 2-0 game to Detroit that lasted an hour, 35 minutes. He routinely had games in the 1:45-1:50 range. If you blinked, you missed three innings.

So if you are looking for an expert to discuss one of baseball’s biggest problems–the maddening slow pace of play–you couldn’t find a better one than Kaat.

Make no mistake, Kaat’s passion for baseball is as high at 74 as it was at 20 when he broke in with the Washington Senators in 1959. Kaat will join Bob Costas for Game 2 of the St. Louis-Pittsburgh series Friday at 1 p.m. (ET) on MLB Network. He also is slated to work a playoff game Monday for MLB Network.

Kaat, though, thinks the game would be better if it moved quicker. He hardly is alone here. Game times have become bloated in the last 20 years. For instance, Game 3 of the 2012 World Series took three hours, 25 minutes. A slugfest, right? No, that was for a 2-0 victory for San Francisco over Detroit.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Kaat said. “It’s not that I want to get the game over with. It’s just that 2-1 game in three hours, 15 minutes is too long. It’s not necessary.”

Television obviously is a culprit by adding more commercials. To show how much times have changed, Kaat told an amusing story of White Sox General Manager Roland Hemond asking him to take more time between innings.

“I worked so fast, a couple of times, they’d come back from commercial, and there would be one, even two outs,” said the 283-career game winner. “I didn’t have compassion for TV back then. My focus was on pitching. I said to Roland, ‘Do I have to?’ He said, ‘No.’ So I didn’t.”

Any chance of that request being turned down today? Ha. No way, not in an era where TV is king. Kaat thinks the long gaps between innings (two-and-a-half to three minutes) have an impact that carries over once play resumes.

“Players now sit in the dugout and wait because they know they’re going to get two-and-a-half minutes,” Kaat said. “It makes the whole pace, running back on to the field and then playing the game, much slower.”

TV, though, doesn’t get the entire blame here. In Game 2 of the 1965 World Series, Kaat and Minnesota took a 5-1 victory over Sandy Koufax and the Los Angeles Dodgers. The game took two hours, 13 minutes. So let’s add an additional 30 minutes for commercials in the modern telecast. That’s still a game time of two hours, 43 minutes.

Now you’ll be hard-pressed to find a post-season game under three hours. Tuesday, Pittsburgh’s 6-2 victory over Cincinnati went three hours, 14 minutes.

Kaat jokes that he blames Ken “Hawk” Harrelson for introducing the batting glove to baseball. Now every hitter has to step out of the box and adjust his glove after a pitch. He actually charted the numbing routine during a playoff game a few years ago, and it added 35 minutes to the game.

“If Mickey Mantle took a pitch, he’d keep his back foot in place and reset his front foot,” Kaat said. “He’d be ready to go. You never see that today.”

The other “little things,” as Kaat says, bog down the game: Repeated catcher’s visits to the mound; more pitching changes than back in his era; and don’t get him started on theme music for individual hitters.

“Now they all wait in the on-deck circle for their theme music to begin,” Kaat said. “It’s ridiculous.”

The concern, Kaat and others say, is that long games are turning off viewers, especially in the younger demographics. This is a fast-paced society and games that run on at three hours, 30 minutes are too languid to captivate short attention spans, young and old. I see it in my own home. My 18-year-old son, Matt, told me he is more excited about watching early-season hockey games than postseason baseball.

Frankly, I’m not sure why the networks don’t push MLB harder to improve the pace of these big games. More isn’t better here.

Obviously, MLB can put rules in place to speed up the game, but old habits die hard. Kaat contends the key now is for baseball to get players in the minor leagues. Teach them how to play faster.

“You have to go to the minor leagues with the game on TV in mind,” Kaat said. “Encourage hitters to stay in the box. Encourage pitchers to work faster. You do all those little things, and you could knock off 30-45 minutes off a game.”

What MLB really should do is show those minor leaguers old videos of Kaat working quickly and efficiently on the mound. There’s a reason why he won all those games.

Or better yet, have Kaat suit up. Even at 74, I bet he still can work faster than the kids.

For the latest in sports media, follow me at Sherman_Report.

Did Goodell do Frontline concussion documentary, book a favor by sending letter to NFL fans?

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If you are PBS and Crown Publishing, you have to love that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell sent out a letter to an estimated 10 million NFL fans yesterday, addressing the concussion issue.

The letter came a day after excerpts from the new book, League of Denial, ran in Sports Illustrated and ESPN.com. The book, written by Mark and Steve Fainaru, forms the basis for the upcoming documentary which has the same title Tuesday night on PBS.

From PBS.org:

A league spokesman told FRONTLINE that the email was the commissioner’s 11th such message to fans since 2011, and is part of an effort “to inform fans on progress we have made on the safety front in youth football.”

Yeah sure. The timing and content of the letter seems to be a direct effort to refute the notion that the league looked the other way for way too long when it came to concussions, as charged in the film and book.

Either way, I’m betting most of the recipients of the Goodell’s letter weren’t aware of upcoming documentary or the book. Now he focused more attention on both of them.

Goodell obviously had to issue some sort of response. However, it likely will produce higher ratings for the documentary and more sales for the book.

For the latest in sports media, follow me at Sherman_Report.

 

Posted in NFL

At age 74, Jim Kaat still on center stage; will work Pirates-Cardinals today for MLB Network

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Baseball truly has been a game for a lifetime for Jim Kaat.

More than 54 years after Kaat made his Major League debut with the Washington Senators as a young 20-year-old pitcher in 1959, he still is on center stage. Today, he will join Bob Costas on the call for Game 2 of the Pittsburgh-St. Louis series (MLB Network, 1 p.m.). He also is slated to work another game Monday for MLB Network.

Kaat always has been one of my favorites. As a pitcher, he won 283 games, and as I wrote earlier, nobody worked faster.

Kaat then made the transition to the broadcast booth, working for the networks and the Yankees. And he’s still working and loving the game at the age of 74.

“I didn’t think I’d be doing it at 64,” Kaat said. “The fun part for me is reconnecting with everyone. I knew John Farrell when he was a sophomore at Oklahoma State. I know Mike Matheny was coached by Bill Freehan. I remember Clint Hurdle as the cover boy for Sports Illustrated when he was with the Royals.

“When I walk in the locker room, a lot of the current players don’t know that I played. So reconnecting and being around the conversation, to me, that’s stimulating and enjoyable.”

Like many players of his generation, Kaat isn’t a big fan of the modern emphasis on stats. In his view, nothing beats boots-on-the-ground reporting.

“In today’s baseball, you sift through so much meaningless information,” Kaat said. “Like what a guy hits in day games when his wife is out of town. Stuff like that. The challenge for me is to pare it down to meaningful information that the fans find on the Internet or MLB Network. You find those things out just before the game when you’re talking to the players and coaches.”

Who are Kaat’s favorite pitchers today? Naturally, the guys who work quickly and throw strikes.

“I prefer the guys who changes speeds and don’t just try to overpower the hitters,” Kaat said. “Kershaw, of course. I enjoy watching Kris Medlen of the Braves. Tampa Bay has a number of guys who do that. Cole Hammels. Cliff Lee is the gold standard of pitching like we did. Working fast and throwing strikes.”

 

 

 

Posted in MLB

One more time: Why isn’t Steve Sabol in NFL Hall of Fame?

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Just caught up with NFL Network’s excellent documentary on Steve Sabol, which aired Tuesday night. If you missed it, be sure to check the listings for the re-airs and make a point of watching and/or set your DVR.

It is that good. Here is a link to a clip.

The film ended with Sabol celebrating his father, Ed, going into the Hall of Fame. It was a deserving honor for Ed, the founder of NFL Films.

Yet as the documentary shows, it was Steve, the artist, who elevated NFL Films to an entirely new level. In the process, Steve’s vision and work elevated the entire NFL.

While watching the film, I found myself asking again and again: Why isn’t Steve in the Hall along with his father? Heck, forget about a bust; Steve should have his own wing. His impact on the game was that profound.

When he died in Sept., 2012, I noted that he should be in the Hall. Now another year has gone by, and he still isn’t in Canton. Time to correct this huge oversight in 2014. It really is beyond ridiculous.

What I wrote last year still stands:

He deserved to have his day at Canton, and we all deserved to hear his induction speech. You just know it would have been truly memorable.

 

Is he serious? Jalen Rose predicts Michael Jordan will play in a NBA game this year

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Usually I don’t put up these kind of videos, but I can’t resist this one.

Jalen Rose in a Grantland video says Michael Jordan will play one game for the Charlotte Bobcats this year. And he’s serious.

The comment initially makes Bill Simmons speechless, no easy feat.

Jordan now is 50 and has packed on a few pounds since his playing days. Hard to think he’s going to pull a Minnie Minoso, the former Sox player who had two at bats in 1980 at the age of 54.

Rose, though, appears to be serious. At the very least, his remark will generate page views for Grantland. Hopefully, a few for me too.

 

Really excited in Evanston: Northwestern produces video to welcome GameDay

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In my Chicago Tribune column this week, GameDay producer Lee Fitting talked about the most enthusiastic crowds for the show.

“Whenever we go to a new place or a place where we haven’t been in a long time, you can see the genuine excitement in the faces of the kids,” Fitting said. “They are excited to see the guys. That’s when we get our warmest receptions.”

Well, count Northwestern as being extremely excited for Saturday’s visit from Chris, Lee, Kirk, and Desmond. The school actually produced a video to mark the occasion. It features everyone from Pat Fitzgerald to school president Morton Schapiro.

So yes, this is a big deal.

Golf Digest: Move to Fox about making U.S. Open bigger than Masters; inside the deal

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The November edition of Golf Digest has Ron Sirak’s terrific breakdown of the stunning move of the U.S. Open going from NBC to Fox Sports, beginning in 2015.

The art features a Fox choking a peacock, which pretty much says it all.

Sirak writes about USGA president Glen Nager’s desire:

He is also a man hellbent on reinventing the USGA to make it what he sees as more relevant. NBC/Golf Channel executives who met with him that day at Seminole heard evidence of that.

“I told them that if you went back to the ’70s and looked at TV ratings and other indicia of what makes a championship great, the U.S. Open was considered the premier major championship in golf,” Nager says. “And that if we looked at indicia today, the Masters is considered the No. 1 major in golf. I said I wanted to work with a media partner that had a proposal to elevate the U.S. Open and the other USGA championships and the USGA as a governance organization.” (The weekend rating of the 1973 U.S. Open beat the Masters, 9.0 to 8.4. The next year, the Masters edged ahead and began widening the gap after that.)

Now don’t go blaming NBC here. The Masters and Augusta National have achieved a certain mystique. Also, keep in mind when the events are played; Masters in early spring when the weather still is cold in most of the country, keeping people inside; U.S. Open in mid-June when people are outside and not tied to the TV. That accounts for a significant difference in the ratings.

Sirak writes about NBC bringing in Arnie:

And then the door opened, and in walked Arnold Palmer, one of the founders of Golf Channel and a longtime USGA spokesman. Palmer gave an impassioned appeal that he believed it was in the best interest of the game to keep the package with NBC/GC. One of the lawyers from Proskauer asked for Palmer’s autograph.

Arnie should have sealed the deal, right? Nope.

Sirak writes about NBC receiving the news.

Then shortly after 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 7, NBC’s Lazarus got a phone call from Nager breaking the bad news. FOX, which had never televised golf in the United States—though Sky Sports, also owned by News Corporation, does golf overseas—had the exclusive rights to the U.S. Open and the rest of the USGA properties for 12 years beginning in 2015. “The board made its decision on Wednesday morning, and our president informed NBC sometime Wednesday,” Hirshland confirmed.

“Deals like this don’t happen this quickly,” says one former USGA staffer.

“Only four or five people knew what our offer was,” says an NBC official. “When you’re a longtime incumbent, you get some sort of hometown prerogative. Would we have matched? I don’t know. They chose not to give us the opportunity. FOX ended at $93 [million a year], NBC just north of $80 [million].”

“With the benefit of hindsight, we’re not sure the process was handled in the way that it was presented to us,” says NBC spokesman Greg Hughes.

NBC was never given a chance to top the FOX offer, something Nager defends.

“I told John Skipper at ESPN, I told Brian Roberts and Mark Lazarus at NBC/Comcast, and we told Randy Freer at FOX they had a 5 p.m. Monday deadline for making their last, best and final offer,” Nager says. “I had given my word that I wouldn’t [divulge bids]. They needed to value these things according to what they thought was the appropriate thing to do and be comfortable with their bid.”

NBC golf producer Tommy Roy tells Fox where to go.

The sentence in the USGA release that annoyed NBC and ESPN was this one: “The game is evolving and requires bold and unique approaches on many levels, and FOX shares our vision to seek fresh thinking and innovative ideas to deliver championship golf.” Mike McQuade, who produces golf for ESPN, and NBC’s Roy privately bristled at what they perceived as a knock on their ingenuity.

“We were disappointed that the USGA chose to disparage our production and the production of every media company [CBS, ESPN, Turner, Golf Channel, NBC] that covers golf instead of just being candid in choosing money over mission,” says NBC’s Lazarus.

Barely more than two hours after that press release about bold new directions went out, a former NBC executive now at FOX, David Neal, called Roy to talk about jumping to FOX. A close friend says Roy viewed the wording of the press release as “reprehensible” and told Neal thanks, but no thanks.

Now the upcoming stories will be on how Fox creates a golf production team from scratch. Everyone will be watching.

Cover: SI should have gone with NFL concussion book excerpt over Kate Upton

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OK, nothing wrong with a little fun. The Upton cover concept was clever.

Besides, the presence of Kate Upton on the cover will help newsstands sales, even if she isn’t in a skimpy bathing suit.

However, there was a better choice this week. Sports Illustrated has the excerpt from Mark and Steve Fainaru’s new book about concussions and football, League of Denial.

The headline on the SI.com: An exclusive excerpt from the book the NFL doesn’t want you to read

Indeed, there’s some eye-opening stuff in the excerpt. It is going to generate considerable talk. Given the gravity of the story and the anticipation for the book, it would seem to be cover material. Certainly more so than Kate Upton in a baseball uniform.

By the way, the excerpt from the book led with a terrific passage featuring the legendary David Halberstam:

Late in 1994, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue appeared with two other commissioners, the NBA’s David Stern and the NHL’s Gary Bettman, in the auditorium at New York City’s 92nd Street Y to discuss the state of their respective leagues. The panel’s moderator was the journalist David Halberstam, who had gone on to a career of writing books, including several about sports, after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Vietnam War for The New York Times.

After dispensing with questions about labor relations and league finances, Halberstam turned to the NFL’s growing concussion problem. Tagliabue dismissed the matter as a “pack journalism issue” and claimed that the NFL experienced “one concussion every three or four games,” which he said came out to 2.5 concussions for every “22,000 players engaged.”

For Halberstam, it was a moment of déjà vu. He seemed to be taken back to the days of the Five O’Clock Follies, the name the Saigon press corps bestowed upon the surreal, statistics-crammed U.S. government press briefings. Halberstam compared the NFL commissioner with the U.S. defense secretary of the 1960s. “I feel I’m back in Vietnam hearing [Robert] McNamara give statistics,” he told the audience, which howled.

Ford Frick candidates: Castiglione, Shannon, Harrelson up for Hall of Fame broadcast honor

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Who gets the nod? I’ll have more thoughts on this soon.

From the Hall of Fame:

*******

Ten of the National Pastime’s iconic voices have been named as the finalists for the 2014 Ford C. Frick Award, presented annually for excellence in baseball broadcasting by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

The 10 finalists for the 2014 Frick Award are: Joe Castiglione, Jacques Doucet, Ken Harrelson, Bill King, Duane Kuiper, Eric Nadel, Eduardo Ortega, Mike Shannon, Dewayne Staats and Pete van Wieren. The winner of the 2014 Frick Award will be announced on December 11 at the Baseball Winter Meetings and will be honored during the July 26 Awards Presentation as part of Hall of Fame Weekend 2014 in Cooperstown.

The 10 finalists for the 2014 Frick Award include the three fan selections produced from online balloting at the Hall of Fame’s Facebook site – www.facebook.com/baseballhall – in September. A total of 20,968 votes were cast. Doucet, King and Kuiper emerged as the top three fan selections in the online voting. The other seven candidates were chosen by a Hall of Fame research committee. All broadcasters on the ballot, with the exception of King and van Wieren, are active. All the finalists except for King are living.

The 2014 Frick Award ballot reflects recent changes in the selection process where eligible candidates are grouped together by years of most significant contributions of their broadcasting careers. The new cycle begins with the High Tide Era, which features broadcasters whose main body of work came from the mid-1980s – the start of the regional cable network era – through the present.

The new three-year cycle for the Frick Award will continue in the fall of 2014 with the Living Room Era, which will feature candidates whose most significant years fell during the mid-1950s through the early 1980s. In the fall of 2015, candidates will be considered from the Broadcasting Dawn Era, which features candidates from the earliest days of broadcasting into the early 1950s.

Final voting for the 2014 Frick Award will be conducted by a 20-member electorate, comprised of the 16 living Frick Award recipients and five broadcast historians/columnists, including past Frick honorees Marty Brennaman, Jerry Coleman, Gene Elston, Joe Garagiola, Jaime Jarrin, Milo Hamilton, Tony Kubek, Tim McCarver, Denny Matthews, Jon Miller, Felo Ramirez, Vin Scully, Lon Simmons, Bob Uecker, Dave Van Horne and Bob Wolff, and historians/columnists Bob Costas (NBC), Barry Horn (Dallas Morning News), Ted Patterson (historian) and Curt Smith (historian).

To be considered, an active or retired broadcaster must have a minimum of 10 years of continuous major league broadcast service with a ball club, network, or a combination of the two. More than 160 broadcasters were eligible for consideration for the award based on these qualifications for 2014.

The 10 finalists for the 2014 Frick Award:

Castiglione has spent 33 years calling big league games, the last 30 as the Red Sox’s lead radio voice;

Doucet spent 34 years broadcasting for the Expos as the play-by-play radio voice on their French network (1969-2004), and he returned to the booth in 2012 for select games as the Blue Jays’ French-speaking TV voice;

Harrelson has brought a passionate voice to the air for the Red Sox, Yankees and White Sox, including 27 years in Chicago;

King worked for 25 seasons (1981-2005) as the A’s lead play-by-play voice on radio;

Kuiper has called games for 28 seasons, all but one with the Giants after spending 1993 with the expansion Rockies;

Nadel has spent the last 35 seasons with the Rangers – the longest tenure of any announcer in franchise history – including the last 21 as the club’s lead play-by-play voice;

Ortega has handled Spanish-language MLB broadcasts for 27 years, including the last 21 as the voice of the Padres on radio and TV;

Shannon has called Cardinals games for 42 years following a nine-year playing career with the Redbirds;

Staats has called big league games for 36 years, including the last 16 as the voice of the Rays.

Van Wieren called Braves games on television and radio from 1976-2008.

 

Additional biographical information on the 10 finalists can be found at www.baseballhall.org. Voters are asked to base their selections on the following criteria: longevity; continuity with a club; honors, including national assignments such as the World Series and All-Star Games; and popularity with fans.

 

The annual award is named in memory of Hall of Famer Ford C. Frick, renowned sportswriter, radio broadcaster, National League president and Baseball commissioner. Past recipients of the Ford C. Frick Award:

 

FORD C. FRICK AWARD RECIPIENTS

1978 Mel Allen 1990 By Saam 2003 Bob Uecker
  Red Barber 1991 Joe Garagiola 2004 Lon Simmons
1979 Bob Elson 1992 Milo Hamilton 2005 Jerry Coleman
1980 Russ Hodges 1993 Chuck Thompson 2006 Gene Elston
1981 Ernie Harwell 1994 Bob Murphy 2007 Denny Matthews
1982 Vin Scully 1995 Bob Wolff 2008 Dave Niehaus
1983 Jack Brickhouse 1996 Herb Carneal 2009 Tony Kubek
1984 Curt Gowdy 1997 Jimmy Dudley 2010 Jon Miller
1985 Buck Canel 1998 Jaime Jarrin 2011 Dave Van Horne
1986 Bob Prince 1999 Arch McDonald 2012 Tim McCarver
1987 Jack Buck 2000 Marty Brennaman 2013 Tom Cheek
1988 Lindsey Nelson 2001 Felo Ramirez    
1989 Harry Caray 2002 Harry Kalas