The Baseball Hall of Fame announced its finalists for the 2018 Ford C. Frick Award on Monday, with eight announcers in contention for one of the highest honors in baseball broadcasting.
The finalists are, in alphabetical order, Buddy Blattner, Joe Buck, Bob Costas, Dizzy Dean, Don Drysdale, Al Michaels, Joe Morgan and Pee Wee Reese.
The winner will be announced on Dec. 13 at MLB's Winter Meetings in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., and will be honored during the Hall of Fame festivities in Cooperstown next season. If Blattner, Dean, Drysdale or Reese were to win, the award would be posthumously received.
This year's nominees are part of the national voices category of the Frick Award, part of a three-year cycle for the award that also includes current Major League markets (announcers focused on a single team) and broadcasting beginnings (pioneers and early voices).
An electorate of 11 living Frick Award recipients and four broadcast historians/columnists will conduct final voting for the 2018 award. That living Frick Award recipient panel consists of Marty Brennaman, Dick Enberg, Jaime Jarrin, Tony Kubek, Denny Matthews, Tim McCarver, Jon Miller, Eric Nadel, Vin Scully, Bob Uecker and Dave Van Horne. The historians/columnists are David J. Halberstam, Barry Horn, Ted Patterson and Curt Smith.
This award is named in honor of Ford C. Frick, a Hall of Fame sportswriter, radio broadcaster, National League president and baseball commissioner.