Dan Shaughnessy wins 2016 Spink Award

Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy, who has been a major voice on baseball in New England and nationally for 35 years, has been elected the 2016 winner of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award in balloting by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.

He will be honored with the award that is presented annually to a sportswriter “for meritorious contributions to baseball writing” during Hall of Fame Weekend July 22-25 in Cooperstown. Shaughnessy will receive the award on Saturday, July 23 at the Awards Presentation at Doubleday Field.

Shaughnessy received 185 votes from the 417 ballots, including one blank, cast by BBWAA members with 10 or more consecutive years’ service in becoming the 67th winner of the award since its inception in 1962 and named for the first recipient. Spink was a driving force of the Sporting News, known during his lifetime as the “Baseball Bible.”

The late Furman Bisher, who wrote more than 15,000 columns in a 59-year career for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, received 157 votes. Juan Vene, who for more than 60 years both in print and on the airwaves has connected strongly with baseball fans throughout Latin America, got 74 votes.

Shaughnessy, 62, came to the Globe in 1981 after four years of covering baseball for the Baltimore Evening Sun and Washington Star. The Holy Cross College graduate has covered more than 35 spring trainings and 25 World Series. Shaughnessy has written 12 books, nine of them on baseball, notably Curse of the Bambino. He also popularized the phrase, “Red Sox Nation.”

Through his columns, Shaughnessy has taken on owners, front offices, managers, coaches and players alike in pertinent issues through good times and bad with the Red Sox. He has covered three championship Red Sox teams, the heartbreaking 1986 season and wrote some of his most eloquent prose in 2004 after Boston ended its 86-year title drought.

Shaughnessy was the last writer to interview Ted Williams, in 2002, and had exclusive access to Williams in his final years.

Shaughnessy became the fifth Boston-based writer to be honored. He joined Harold Kaese and Tim Murnane, plus his former Globe colleagues Peter Gammons and Larry Whiteside.