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BBWAA Career Excellence Award

Annual award for baseball writers

Field	Value
name	BBWAA Career Excellence Award
image	J. G. Taylor Spink (1911).jpg
image_size	150px
caption	J. G. Taylor Spink, the award's first recipient and former namesake
sport	Baseball
givenfor	"Meritorious contributions to baseball writing"
presenter	Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA)
location	National Baseball Hall of Fame
Cooperstown, New York
first	1962
firstwinner	J. G. Taylor Spink
mostrecent	Thomas Boswell ()
url

Cooperstown, New York The BBWAA Career Excellence Award, formerly the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, is the highest award given by the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA). It is given "for meritorious contributions to baseball writing" and voted on annually by the BBWAA. Winners are typically announced in December, with the award presented at the Baseball Hall of Fame in July.

Recipients of the award are not members of the Hall of Fame—they are not "inducted" or "enshrined", they are not "Hall of Fame sportswriters", and there is no "writers' wing" of the Hall of Fame—they are officially "honorees." The award is given at a separate ceremony from the induction ceremony on Hall of Fame weekend. As with recipients of the Ford C. Frick Award for baseball broadcasting, the honorees are permanently recognized in a "Scribes & Mikemen" exhibit in the Hall's library.

The award was instituted in 1962 and named after J. G. Taylor Spink, publisher of The Sporting News from 1914 to 1962, and the award's first recipient. In February 2021, the BBWAA voted to remove his name from the award "due to Spink’s troubled history in supporting segregated baseball."

Eligibility

The honoree does not have to be a member of the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA), but every recipient from the award's 1962 inception through 2013 had been a BBWAA member at some time. The first recipient who had never been a BBWAA member was recipient Roger Angell. Despite having written on baseball for more than a half-century, Angell never worked a specific baseball writing beat, thereby making him ineligible for BBWAA membership.

Veterans Committee role

For several years in the early 2000s, honorees became life members of the Veterans Committee, which elects players whose eligibility for BBWAA consideration has ended, and is also the sole body that elects non-players for induction into the Hall. Starting with elections for induction in , voting on the main Veterans Committee, which then selected only players whose careers began in 1943 or later, was restricted to Hall of Fame members. After further changes announced for the and elections, BBWAA Career Excellence Award winners are eligible to serve on all of the era-based voting bodies that succeeded the Veterans Committee (and are still colloquially referred to as such).

Recipients

Through 2006, the BBWAA designated honorees based on the announcement year (typically in December). In the below table, winners through 2006 are listed with both their announcement year, and their induction ceremony year (the ensuing summer). In 2007, the BBWAA changed the year designation for the award to coincide with the induction ceremony. Thus, while the official BBWAA year designations jump from 2006 to 2008, the award has been bestowed annually since inception, except for one year missed due to the 1994–95 Major League Baseball strike.

From 1972 through 1981, there were multiple honorees each year. This again occurred in 1988 and 1992. Since that time, there has been a single winner each year.

Through 2010, the award was presented during the actual induction ceremony; since then, it has been presented at the Hall of Fame awards presentation, held the day before the induction ceremony. In recent years, the Hall of Fame has announced the finalists for the award and final vote totals. Previously, such detail was not made public, with only the winner announced.

Year	Honoree	Beat	Ref.	Name
1962 ()	1888	1962	St. Louis
1963 ()	1885	1933	Chicago
1964 ()	1873	1945	Chicago
1965 ()	1860	1931	Chicago
1966 ()	1880	1954	New York City
1967 ()	1880	1946	New York City
1968 ()	1885	1958	Detroit
1969 ()	1880	1945	New York City
1970 ()	1888	1939	New York City
1971 ()	1893	1965	New York City
1972 ()	1890	1981	New York City
1888	1980	New York City
1892	1972	St. Louis
1973 ()	1894	1978	Chicago
1891	1979	New York City
1892	1981	New York City
1974 ()	1902	1986	Chicago
1880	1946	Philadelphia
1975 ()	1903	1964	New York City
1905	1998	Washington, D.C.
1976 ()	1909	1975	Boston
1905	1982	New York City
1977 ()	1898	1969	Cleveland
1907	2002	Chicago
1978 ()	1851	1917	Boston
1917	1987	New York City
1979 ()	1918	2005	St. Louis
1903	1975	New York City
1980 ()	1915	1988	New York City
1922	1986	New York City
1981 ()	1916	2003	Philadelphia
1910	1982	Washington, D.C.
1982 ()	1909	1986	Dayton, Ohio
1983 ()	1902	1991	New York City
1984 ()	1926	2006	Kansas City, Missouri
1985 ()	1923	2003	Cincinnati
1986 ()	1921	2007	New York City
1987 ()	1919	1998	Los Angeles
1988 ()	1913	1993	Los Angeles
1914	1988	Philadelphia
1989 ()	1926	2008	Chicago
1990 ()	1925	2001	San Diego
1991 ()	1921	2001	Dayton, Ohio
1992 ()	1923	2003	New York City
1920	1989	Philadelphia
1993 ()	1914	1972	Pittsburgh
1994 ()	—	—	—
1995 ()	1924	2004	New York City
1996 ()	1924	2014	New York City
1997 ()	1903	2003	Washington, D.C.
1998 ()	1916	2002	San Francisco
1999 ()	1916	2005	Cleveland
2000 ()			Los Angeles
2001 ()	1928	2004	Detroit
2002 ()	1940		Dayton, Ohio
2003 ()	1938		New York City
2004 ()	1945		Boston
2005 ()	1951		Seattle, Kansas City, Dallas, Denver
2006 ()	1946	2023	St. Louis
	1937	2007	Kansas City, Milwaukee, Boston
	1939	2015	San Francisco
	1946		New York City
	1934	2014	Philadelphia
	1949		Montreal / Toronto
		1951		Dallas–Fort Worth / Philadelphia
	1920	2022	The New Yorker
	1948		Detroit
	1953		Baltimore, Boston
	1954		New York City
	1942		Akron, Ohio
	1951		Philadelphia
	1956	2019	Boston
	1939		St. Louis, Kansas City
	1956		Dallas, Baltimore, Sports Illustrated, ESPN.com
	c. 1959		Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit
	1954	2019	Dallas, Atlanta, The Sporting News
	1947		Washington, D.C.
			Cleveland

Notes

This award should not be confused with the Topps Minor League Player of the Year Award, which was also known as the "J. G. Taylor Spink Award".

References

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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