Boswell's legacy honored with Career Excellence Award

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. -- Many writers have held the title of national baseball reporter for their publication over the years, but Thomas Boswell may be the most appropriate, covering the sport from the nation’s capital -- even when it didn’t have a team.

Boswell, who spent his entire 52-year career with The Washington Post -- and, in “retirement,” still writes a column a month -- accepted the Baseball Writers’ Association of America’s Career Excellence Award Saturday during the Hall of Fame Awards Presentation at the Glimmerglass Festival’s Alice Busch Opera Theater on the shores of Otsego Lake. Also honored was Guardians broadcaster Tom Hamilton, the winner of the Ford C. Frick Award.

The BBWAA’s Career Excellence Award recognizes “meritorious contributions to baseball writing,” and Boswell is its 76th recipient.

“I've been enthralled by baseball all my life,” Boswell said during his speech. “So, this is the one award I've always fantasized about. To be honored here, included in Cooperstown, a very small part but a very permanent part of the game I love, deserves something that I don't usually do: I'm gonna give myself a high five.”

And with that, the man known as Boz to his colleagues held up one hand and slapped the other, thwacking one of the microphones on the lectern in the process and drawing laughs and applause from the audience.

Boswell, who was born in Washington, D.C., began his career as a copy aide in The Post’s sports department right out of Amherst College in 1969. He worked in the composing room, answered phones and covered high school sporting events.

“Everybody needs a leg up: a break, a scout to find you -- if you're a ball player -- or, in my case, editors who believed in you,” he said. “Hard work is great, luck is essential. After college, I got the lowest job at the entire Washington Post: I was a part-time copy boy on the 5:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. “lobster shift.” Being a Lobster is not a compliment. I covered the same high school football game six years in a row. I covered boomerang contests. I was the duckpin bowling editor.”

In 1975, Boswell attended the World Series between the Reds and Red Sox as The Post’s national baseball writer -- at a time such a job description was new.

“George Solomon, my editor for 28 years, invented a beat for me that had never existed,” Boswell said. “He made me the national Major League Baseball writer for a paper in a town that did not even have a Major League team. No one had ever imagined that.”

Five years after that World Series, Boswell became The Post’s Orioles beat reporter, covering the team through Cal Ripken Jr.’s debut in 1981 and their World Series championship in ’83.

“Thanks to all the people of the game who understood what I wanted most from them: an education,” Boswell said. “Earl Weaver was my grad school professor.”

One day in particular stood out to the beat writer. He and Weaver were alone in the dugout before a ballgame.

“He looked up at me,” Boswell said. “It had been three years [he had been on the beat]. And he looked at me seriously. And he said, ‘You're still here.’ And I took that as one of the best compliments I ever got, and I still choose to believe that he saw that he had identified a fellow baseball lifer.”

In 1984, Boswell was named a national sports columnist for The Post, holding that title until his retirement in 2021. He covered every World Series from ’75 until 2019 – capping the run, appropriately, the year the Washington Nationals won their first.

Boswell opted out of attending the 2020 Fall Classic played in Arlington, Texas, because of the risks of the COVID-19 pandemic at the age of 73. The Nationals’ title was a fitting capstone to his career, which began with the Washington Senators playing at RFK Stadium and included a 33-year gap without a Major League team in D.C.

“Baseball is about generations,” he said. “We don't play the game. We replay the memories. And we replay them together. We are bound by affection to the family and the friends with whom we share the game. That's why tens of thousands of fans are flocking here right now.”

They’re flocking to a place where Boswell now has a permanent spot, alongside his peers and his influences. He’s influenced others, and some of them will one day make similar speeches on another induction weekend.

“Many people I've mentioned today are now in the Hall of Fame,” he said. “Whether I believe it or not, I'm in a room nearby. Thanks, baseball: my subject for study and inspiration, my companion, always available. .... My bond was a huge community of others. Generations of them are gathering here right now. We share our affection for all that baseball has given us in our lives. We will anticipate the fun and the surprises to come. And we'll amble through the Hall of Fame here and feel, as I do, grateful.”