Joe Buck finally won the Ford C. Frick Award.
The Baseball Hall of Fame announced Wednesday that Buck earned the 2026 honor after falling short three previous times as a finalist. He’ll be honored during Hall of Fame Weekend in July and becomes the only broadcaster to join his father, Jack (who won in 1987), as a Frick Award winner.
Buck called 24 World Series on Fox from 1996-2021, more than any play-by-play voice in history. He also called 21 All-Star Games and spent 26 years as Fox’s lead baseball voice while simultaneously calling Cardinals games locally through 2007. He left Fox in 2022 to join ESPN’s Monday Night Football and has mostly stayed away from baseball since.
The 56-year-old Buck was a finalist in 2018, ’21, and ’24 before winning this year. He lost to Bob Costas in 2018, Al Michaels in 2021, and Tom Hamilton last year. The other finalists this year were Brian Anderson, Skip Caray, Rene Cardenas, Gary Cohen, Jacques Doucet, Duane Kuiper, John Rooney, Dan Shulman, and John Sterling.
Buck is the sixth broadcaster to win both the Frick Award and the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Pete Rozelle Award, which he received in 2020. That’s rarified air, and it reflects Buck’s ability to master two sports at the highest level, even if plenty of people spent decades complaining about him doing it.
The knock on Buck for years was that he was too young, too polished, too detached. He got the Fox job at 27 and called his first World Series the same year, which made him the youngest Series announcer since Scully in 1953. People resented the nepotism angle. They resented that he didn’t sound excited enough. They resented that he worked football and baseball simultaneously and wondered if he cared about either. But Buck outlasted the criticism and built a résumé that eventually became impossible to ignore. He worked with Tim McCarver for 18 years on Fox, and John Smoltz after that. He became the soundtrack to October baseball, whether people liked it or not.
The Frick Award doesn’t erase the polarizing parts of Buck’s career, but it does recognize what he accomplished. He called more World Series than anyone else. He held the Fox lead job for a quarter century. He followed his father into the booth and then followed him into Cooperstown. That’s the story, and it’s a pretty good one.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.