Boswell honored by BBWAA after half a century of writing excellence

Thomas Boswell, who spent more than five decades covering baseball in the nation’s capital, has now been honored with the highest distinction his profession bestows.

On Tuesday at the Winter Meetings in Dallas, Boswell was named the 2025 winner of the BBWAA Career Excellence Award. He will be honored with the award that is presented annually to a sportswriter “for meritorious contributions to baseball writing” during the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s induction weekend July 25-28 in Cooperstown, N.Y.

“I couldn’t be happier,” said Boswell in a phone conversation from his home outside Annapolis, Md., an hour after the BBWAA Career Excellence Award announcement was made. “I’m somebody who grew up 15 blocks from the old Washington Senators ballpark at RFK Stadium in D.C. and rode my bike to cover games there. And it’s gone all the way from that to the last World Series game I covered before COVID, in 2019, when the Nats won their first World Series in 95 years. So, to say it’s a big circle with me happy and grinning in the middle of it would be an understatement.”

Boswell, who worked at the Washington Post for 52 years, explained his emotions when he received the big news were absolutely typical of a baseball writer.

“I had been working all day on a column. I was down to about the last three paragraphs,” Boswell recalled. “And I saw the phone call coming in. It didn’t say Cooperstown or anything. It was just a phone number. And I said, ‘I don’t know. I think I’ll answer this one.’ I just love the fact that it came while I was battling a column. It just made it seem like the perfect thing. I don’t know how it could have sort of pushed itself all together any better.”

Of the 394 ballots, including two blanks, cast by BBWAA members with 10 or more consecutive years’ service, Boswell was named on 167 in becoming the 76th winner of the award since its inception in 1962. Finishing second with 158 votes was Paul Hoynes, who is into his fifth decade as a baseball beat writer in Cleveland. Bruce Jenkins, a baseball writer and columnist for almost half a century for the San Francisco Chronicle, received 67 votes.

“This is the top of the mountain for baseball writing,” Boswell said. “I always loved writing about everything. I was addicted to trying to learn to play every sport growing up and proved that I was absolutely mediocre at every one. I challenge anyone to have been mediocre at more sports growing up, but baseball was always, by far, the one I loved the most.

“I got to the Washington Post in 1969, we’d lost our team in 1971 and yet, from 1972 until we got a team back 33 years later, they let me spend more time writing about baseball than any other sport because they knew how much I loved it. There was a ton of interest in the Baltimore Orioles in Washington, and that kind of helped keep interest in baseball alive in D.C. The two nicest things in baseball that have ever happened to me was seeing baseball finally get a team back after 33 years with so many people trying so hard to get that to happen and getting to see the team reach the World Series.”

After graduating from Amherst College in 1969 with a degree in English literature, the Washington, D.C. native started at the Post in 1969 as a copy aide, and he spent 12 years as a general-assignment reporter, covering baseball, golf, college basketball, tennis, boxing and local high school sports. He became a sports columnist from 1984 until retiring in 2021. Among his many books are “Game Day,” “The Heart of the Order,” “Why Time Begins on Opening Day” and “How Life Imitates the World Series.”

“I had no idea after college where I was ultimately going to be. It was between semesters, and I was thinking, ‘Well, maybe I’ll go to law school.’ I’d gone to Amherst College, so that ought to have been a logical career path for somebody who was terminally undecided. And our family dentist was also the family dentist for Bob Addie (1981 BBWAA Career Excellence Award winer). So, we asked, through our dentist, Mr. Addie if there’s any chance that Tom could get a job at the Post. And he said, ‘Sure, come in and have him talk to the sports editor and use my name.’ So, I walked in and introduced myself. It didn’t do anything for me. They gave me the lowest job at the entire Washington Post, the 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. parttime copyboy. That’s what a quality education buys you in the sports writing racket.”

Ultimately, baseball proved to be the sport Boswell has spent most of his adult life writing about.

“I think the game is there for you in more different ways, in at more different times, and filling more different needs than any other sport that I’m aware of. It entertains you every day for almost for half the year. It connects you with family. It connects you with friends,” is how Boswell explained the tug baseball has had on him and so many others. “It’s also a sport that can be put down for a day or a week or even longer, and picked back up, and especially picked back up when you need it. And you don’t know when you’re going to need it or why. Maybe it’s because you’re happy and want to go to a game to celebrate something, but maybe it’s also because you’re sad.

“Also, tons of people love baseball who are who are older or who have some kind of disability. It’s just a lifeline for people. So, from the 16-year-old kid in perfect health who worships the local star, to the 86-year-old grandmother who keeps the score of every game, baseball fills in more space and gives you more, in total, than any other sport.”

Tim Kurkjian, recipient of the 2022 BBWAA Career Excellence Award, said he was “absolutely thrilled” with the news of Boswell’s honor when reached by phone at the Winter Meetings.

“I grew up in Bethesda, Md., reading the Washington Post. And I grew up wanting to be Thomas Boswell. When I got older, I grew up idolizing Thomas Boswell,” Kurkjian said. “I’d never seen anybody write baseball the way that he did. He was just so eloquent, he was so poetic, and he was also so funny. And in getting to know Tom pretty darn well over the years, I haven’t met too many people in my life who love the game more than he does.

“And sorry if I offend anyone, but he should have been in a long time ago. That’s how great Thomas Boswell has been for such a long time. And not just as a beat writer, not just as a columnist, but, of course, as an author of several books. And I’ve read every one of them.”

Dan Shaughnessy, the 2016 BBWAA Career Excellence Award winner, said Boswell inspired him as a young reporter on the Orioles beat.

“I was 23 years old,” Shaughnessy said. “Came to cover the Orioles for the Baltimore Evening Sun and then the Washington Star, and I was up against Tom Boswell for five years. I learned the craft by reading him, watching him, and he was so generous, so supportive. Not an ounce of nastiness or bad competition. Just good, healthy competition. And it was very daunting to be writing for these papers when Tom Boswell was covering that team for the for the Post. And I just worship him.

“In my view, the (Museum exhibit) where we get honored, it was incomplete until he was there. He’s better than all of us. It’s just an honor to be to be anywhere near him, always has been.”

Boswell joins a prestigious cavalcade of writers previously honored, including such luminaries as Ring Lardner (1963), Grantland Rice (1966), Damon Runyon (1967), Fred Lieb (1972), Shirley Povich (1975), Red Smith (1976), Jim Murray (1987), Wendell Smith (1993), Roger Angell (2014) and Claire Smith (2017).

“When I look down the list, starting with Shirley Povich, I knew every one of these people and went to dinner or lunch or ate in the press box with them,” Boswell said. “I’ve not just known them all, but I’ve hung out with all of them, sat next to all of them, cussed at a team blowing a lead with a deadline approaching with all of them. So, it’s just like a big gang of friends.

“And my all-time hero growing up was Shirley Povich. He was just a wonderful guy. I got to the Post in time to overlap with him for many years. So, to be in the same place with Shirley, it’s just as great as you think.”

Though he retired from the Post in 2021, the 77-year-old Boswell remains in the game.

“I average about a story a month,” he said. “Their reaction to my retirement was, ‘What?’ They didn’t anticipate it and didn’t want it. Still, they always want me to write anything I want to write, which is a wonderful relationship to have with a paper after more than 50 years.”

Bill Francis is the senior research and writing specialist at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum