A smattering of hometown voices were finalists for the 2025 Ford C. Frick Award, presented annually for excellence in broadcasting by the National Baseball Hall of Fame, but it’s the Guardians’ Tom Hamilton who will be inducted into Cooperstown next July.
Gary Cohen, who calls Mets games for SNY, John Sterling, the longtime radio play-by-play announcer for the Yankees, and Dave Sims, Sterling’s successor who just arrived from the Seattle Mariners, were also up for the award.
Other finalists included Skip Caray, Rene Cardenas, Jacques Doucet, Ernie Johnson Sr., Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper.
Hamilton, who has spent 35 years in Cleveland’s radio booth and joins TV analyst Rick Manning as the longest-tenured broadcaster in team history, was selected as the Frick Award winner because of “his knowledgeable play-by-play and passionate calls of some of the franchise’s most historic moments,” Josh Rawitch, president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum said in a statement released Wednesday.
“With an unmatched love for Cleveland, Tom Hamilton has narrated the story of one of the franchise’s most successful eras since joining the team’s broadcast crew in 1990. Guardians fans adopted Tom as one of their own as soon as he arrived in Cleveland … For a generation of listeners, Tom Hamilton is the very definition of Cleveland baseball,” Rawitch said.
Unlike his larger market peers in the Big Apple, Hamilton spent the entirety of his career in the Midwest.
Cohen, the 66-year-old Queens native, came up calling games for minor league baseball clubs up and down the east coast before becoming the Mets play-by-play announcer. He spent 17 years as a member of the WFAN radio team and has been calling games on TV since 2006.
At around the same time, and right across the East River, a Manhannite named John Sterling was coming up calling contests in a host of now-defunct leagues including the WHA, WFL and ABA. In 1989, Sterling assumed radio duties on WABC Radio and, in 2013, moved to WFAN.
In April 2024, Sterling, 86, announced he would be retiring immediately because of health issues.
The longtime Yankees voice returned briefly for the Bombers’ 2024 playoff run before hanging up the mic for good.
After the season ended, in November 2024, WFAN announced they had secured Sterling’s permanent replacement, naming Mariners’ TV announcer Dave Sims, 71, as their new play-by-play broadcaster.
Sims, who worked for WFAN and WCBS-TV earlier in his career, will join Suzyn Waldman in the booth on a full-time basis beginning in 2025.
