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The National Baseball Hall of Fame announced the finalists for the 2021 Ford C. Frick Award, honoring excellence in the field of broadcasting, and two of the eight finalists were a big part of the sounds of the first two decades of Angels baseball.
Buddy Blattner was a longtime national television voice, calling games alongside Dizzy Dean for CBS and ABC in the 1950s, before calling Angels games locally for KTLA from 1962-68, first in Los Angeles and then in Anaheim. In total, Blattner called major league games for 26 seasons.
Don Drysdale is already in Cooperstown as a pitcher for the Dodgers, but also called Angels games from 1973-80, his longest broadcasting stint with any one team. Dyrsdale was a major league announcer for 23 seasons. Both Blattner (2009) and Drysdale (1993) have since passed away.
Other finalists for the Frick award this year are Joe Buck, Dave Campbell, Dean, Ernesto Jerez, Al Michaels, and Dan Shulman. The winner of the award will be announced on Decmeber 9, and will be inducted into Cooperstown on July 24, 2021.
The Frick award is determined by the 12 living Frick award winners plus three broadcast historians and columnists. David J. Halberstam, Barry Horn, and Curt Smith fit into the latter category.
The only Angels broadcaster to win the Frick Award is Dick Enberg, who was so honored in 2015. Enberg called Angels games from 1969-78 for KTLA, including working alongside Drysdale for the last six of those seasons.
Links
- The top three finishers for the four BBWAA awards — MVP, Cy Young, Rookie of the Year, Manager of the Year — in each league were announced on Monday, with one notable name absent. Jose Abreu, Jose Ramirez, and DJ LeMahieu are the top three for American League MVP, which means this is only the second time in nine years Mike Trout will finish outside of the top two in voting. Trout finished fourth in 2017, a season in which he was limited to just 114 games.
- The Angels 40-man roster and where every single player fits, as broken down by Fabian Ardaya at The Athletic.
- Among the 15 Angels minor league free agents, as reported by Baseball America, include a trio of players who played for the major league team in 2020 — catcher Jose Briceño, infielder Elliot Soto, and outfielder Michael Hermosillo.
- The trial of former Angels PR staffer Eric Kay, in connection with the death of Tyler Skaggs in 2019, will start on December 14 in Fort Worth, Texas, per Nathan Fenno of the Los Angeles Times.