Hamilton Named 2025 Ford C. Frick Award Winner

Tom Hamilton, who has called Cleveland Guardians games on the radio for 35 seasons, has been selected as the 2025 recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award, presented annually for excellence in broadcasting by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

Hamilton will be honored during the Hall of Fame Awards Presentation as part of Hall of Fame Weekend, July 25-28, 2025. Hamilton becomes the 49th winner of the Frick Award, as he earned the highest point total in a vote conducted by the Hall of Fame’s 16-member Frick Award Committee.

The final ballot featured broadcasters whose main contributions came as local and national voices and whose careers began after, or extended into, the Wild Card Era. The 10 finalists were: Skip Caray, Rene Cardenas, Gary Cohen, Jacques Doucet, Ernie Johnson Sr., Mike Krukow, Duane Kuiper, Dave Sims, John Sterling and Hamilton.

“With an unmatched love for Cleveland, Tom Hamilton has narrated the story of one of the franchise’s most successful eras since joining the team’s broadcast crew in 1990,” said Josh Rawitch, president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. “Guardians fans adopted Tom as one of their own as soon as he arrived in Cleveland thanks to his knowledgeable play-by-play and passionate calls of some of the franchise’s most historic moments. For a generation of listeners, Tom Hamilton is the very definition of Cleveland baseball.”

Born August 19, 1954, in Waterloo, Wisconsin, Hamilton came to Cleveland in 1990 after spending the previous three years as the voice of the Triple-A Columbus Clippers. Teaming with the franchise’s beloved former pitcher Herb Score in the broadcast booth, Hamilton soon had a front-row seat to call a resurgent team that advanced to the World Series in both 1995 and 1997.

Assuming duties as the voice of the franchise following Score’s retirement in 1997, Hamilton has partnered with Mike Hegan, Dave Nelson, Jim Rosenhaus, and Matt Underwood during the ensuing decades on WWWE-AM and WTAM-AM, the longtime radio home of the Guardians.

A seven-time winner of the Ohio Sportscaster of the Year Award, Hamilton has called more than 100 postseason games and is the only broadcaster in franchise history to call three different Cleveland World Series teams.

The 16-member Frick Award voting electorate, comprised of the 13 living recipients and three broadcast historians/columnists, includes Frick honorees Marty Brennaman, Joe Castiglione, Bob Costas, Ken Harrelson, Pat Hughes, Jaime Jarrín, Tony Kubek, Denny Matthews, Al Michaels, Jon Miller, Eric Nadel, Bob Uecker and Dave Van Horne, and historians/columnists David J. Halberstam (historian), Barry Horn (formerly of the Dallas Morning News) and Curt Smith (historian).