Shulman wins Canadian Baseball HOF award

TORONTO -- Blue Jays broadcaster Dan Shulman has been named the winner of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame’s 2020 Jack Graney Award, given annually to a member of the media who has made significant contributions to baseball in Canada.

Baseball fans in Canada know Shulman as the television voice of the Blue Jays, a position he has held with Sportsnet since 2016, but his impressive professional resume stretches 30 years and well beyond the diamond. Shulman has broadcast NCAA basketball for ESPN for 25 years, to go along with NBA, NHL and Olympic broadcasts over his career.

Shulman’s path to becoming one of baseball’s most trusted and identifiable voices began in the early 1990s on the airwaves in Toronto and, in '95, Shulman started to work Blue Jays broadcasts alongside Buck Martinez, who he shares a booth again with today. Shulman also worked part-time for ESPN during those years before joining the company full-time in 2001, first as the voice of Wednesday Night Baseball, then Monday Night Baseball, then Sunday Night Baseball. In the postseason, you can find Shulman back behind the radio microphone calling games for ESPN.

“I am tremendously honoured to be receiving this award,” Shulman said in a press release Tuesday. “As a Canadian kid who fell in love with baseball very early on, the opportunity to cover the sport for as long as I have has been one of the great joys of my life. To be part of a list with so many people I have admired for so many years is very humbling. I want to thank the selection committee and the Board of Directors at the Hall for considering me worthy of this honour.”

Typically a fixture at Rogers Centre or on the road with the Blue Jays, Shulman and Martinez called games out of the Sportsnet studio in Toronto during the 2020 season, surrounded by monitors as they brought the shortened 60-game season to viewers in a new way.

Shulman joins an impressive list of current and former colleagues to receive the Jack Graney Award, including the great Bob Elliot (2010) -- who also became the first Canadian to win the J.G. Taylor Spink Award in '12 -- and Jerry Howarth ('12), the longtime radio voice of the Blue Jays. Over 44 years of Blue Jays baseball, fans have been incredibly fortunate to have their team's games called by broadcasting greats like Shulman, Howarth and the late Tom Cheek.

Shulman has also been named one of eight finalists for the Ford C. Frick Award, presented annually by the National Baseball Hall of Fame for excellence in baseball broadcasting.