Former Cardinals Players, St. Louis Browns Radio Team Finalists for Ford C. Frick Broadcasting Honor
Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean and St. Louis native and former Cardinals player Buddy Blattner, who formed the radio team of the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns and worked together as broadcasters on the national Game of the Week for years, have been selected as finalists for the Ford C. Frick Award, which is presented annually for excellence in baseball broadcasting by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
Jay Hanna "Dizzy" Dean, a 1934 World Series champion with the Cardinals and a former star player elected to the Hall of Fame as a pitcher in 1953, made his mark as the voice of CBS’ Game of the Week from 1955-65 following several seasons with the Cardinals and Browns.
Blattner, who was born in St. Louis in 1920 and died at 89 years old in Chesterfield, Mo., in 2009, worked 26 seasons for outlets primarily in the 1950s and 1960s including the Liberty Game of the Day, Mutual Game of the Day, ABC Game of the Week, CBS Game of the Week and NBC, along with several stops with individual teams.
Blatner made his MLB debut with the Cardinals on April 18, 1942. After four years away with the U.S. Navy, he played for the New York Giants (1946-48) and with the Philadelphia Phillies (1949). In 272 MLB games, he racked up 176 hits and a career .247 batting average.
Blatner and Dean are two of the 10 finalists for the Frick Award, presented annually for excellence in baseball broadcasting by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
This ballot will mark the first election featuring a composite ballot of local and national voices whose broadcast careers concluded prior to the advent of the Wild Card in 1994. The election cycle will then return, starting with the 2028 Frick Award, to four straight years of candidates whose careers began or mostly comprise the years after the advent of the Wild Card era. The cycle then repeats.
Here are the other finalists for the award: Ken Coleman, Earl Gillespie, Merle Harmon, Ned Martin, Monte Moore, Gustavo Lopez Moreno, Bill O’Donnell and Jack Quinlan.
The winner of the 2027 Frick Award will be announced on Dec. 9 at Baseball’s Winter Meetings in San Diego and will be honored during the July 24 Awards Presentation as part of the July 23-26 Hall of Fame Weekend 2027 in Cooperstown. Moore and Moreno are the only living candidates on the ballot.
The 2027 Frick Award ballot was created by a subcommittee of the voting electorate that included past Frick honorees Joe Castiglione, Bob Costas, Tom Hamilton and Eric Nadel and broadcast historian Curt Smith. Final voting for the 2027 Frick Award will be conducted by an electorate comprised of the 14 living Frick Award recipients and two broadcast historians/columnists, including past Frick honorees St. Louis native Joe Buck, Marty Brennaman, Castiglione, Costas, Hamilton, Ken Harrelson, Pat Hughes, Jaime Jarrín, Tony Kubek, Denny Matthews, Al Michaels, Jon Miller, Nadel and Dave Van Horne and Smith.
