Thomas Boswell wins 2025 BBWAA's Career Excellence Award

[ValKehl]

I have lived my entire life in the No. Va. suburbs of DC, and baseball has been my favorite sport ever since I was a kid. During all the years when Washington did not have a MLB team (1972 thru 2004), one of my favorite ways to get a baseball fix was to read Thomas Boswell's columns in the Washinton Post. I think everyone will enjoy this read which appears in today's Post:

Thomas Boswell’s speech in Cooperstown: ‘Thanks, baseball’
After all these years, baseball is about generations. We don’t play the game. We replay the memories — together.

EDITOR`S NOTE:
Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell was honored Saturday at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Boswell was the 2025 winner of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America’s Career Excellence Award. Below is the full text of his acceptance speech.


Thanks to the BBWAA for this precious honor. All my life, I have been enthralled by baseball. So this is the one award I always fantasized about. To be included here, a very small but very permanent part of the game I love, is gonna get a high five!

(High-five myself.)

Special thanks to the writers who lobbied for me. You know, “lobby,” that Washington thing. Especially Chelsea Janes, Dave Sheinin, Adam Kilgore and Barry Svrluga from The Post as well as old friends Dan Shaughnessy, Tim Kurkjian, Jayson Stark and classy Bruce Jenkins, who was a finalist this year and yet said, “Vote for Boz.”

I’ve got a lot more “thanks” to give. So, let’s go!

Everybody needs a hand up, a break, scouts who find you or, in my case, editors who believed in you. Hard work is great. Luck matters. After college, I got the lowest job at the entire Washington Post — part-time copy boy on the 5:30 to 2 a.m. lobster shift. I covered the same high school football game six years in a row. Meteoric rise!

But two sports editors changed my career. They’re here today. Don Graham imagined what I might become and broke me out. Then, George Solomon, my editor for 28 years, invented a beat for me that had never existed — national MLB writer for a paper in a town without a team. He sent me everywhere — Chattanooga Lookouts, Spokane Brewers, winter ball in Puerto Rico, baseball in Cuba and in 1975 to the first of 44 straight World Series.

Can we have a fine hand for these wonderful friends?

For me, after all these years, baseball is about generations. We don’t play the game. We replay the memories — together. We are bound by affection to the family and friends with whom we share the game. That’s why tens of thousands of fans are flocking here now.

In that vein, I want to thank Don Larsen for his perfect game in 1956. Larsen? Yes, because that’s where my generational story starts.

When I was 8 years old, I walked home from school just in time to hear my mom and my godfather erupt in cheers, jump and throw their arms in the air. They were watching Larsen’s last pitch on our black-and-white TV. I learned something big — a ballgame could make adults scream like children.

Since then, I’ve been certain that there is more to sports, more power to move us, more links to bond us, more ways to console us and more ways to show us our similarities, not our differences, than we acknowledge. And more to write about, too.

Thanks, Roy Sievers, the AL home run champ in 1957, for being my perfect hometown hero. At age 9, my family took me to a department store where Sievers was autographing. I got lost. Security brought me, in tears, to my folks, long after Roy’s session ended. He was still there — waiting to sign two pictures for the little lost kid.

Thanks to all the people of the game who understood what I wanted most from them: an education. Earl Weaver was my grad school professor for eight years on the O’s beat. After three seasons, we were sitting in the dugout one day, Earl was chain-smoking his unfiltered cigs. “I smoke these damn Raleighs,” he said, “because with 50,000 coupons they give you a brass coffin.” Then, he looked at me and said, “You’re still here.”

He’d spotted a fellow baseball lifer.

I have few Rules to Live By. But Weaver gave me two of them.

We’d ask Earl why what he said in March in spring training didn’t match what he did in May. He’d look at us like we were bugs and say, “Everything changes everything.”

Every injury, every hot rookie who arrives fast or vet who collapses sends ripples through the team. Accept and adapt.

When Earl’s strategies failed, he’d often insist he was correct anyway. “Lose the right way,” he’d say.

What?

With the game on the line, don’t get beat with your third-best pitch. You may lose. That’s baseball. If your best pitch or second best gets clobbered, live with it. But lose the right way.

I just hope my adult son, Russell, who’s in the audience, doesn’t use “Everything Changes Everything” as my epitaph.

When Russ was 8 years old, I took him and his friend Drew to see the Orioles.

Getting out of the car, I slammed the door on Drew’s thumb. He bawled. “Drew, what can I do for you?” I said. The tears stopped. “Can you get me Cal Ripken’s autograph?”

We’re not supposed to do that. But a few days later, I asked Cal to sign a ball for Drew. He said, “I’ll leave it in my locker between games of the doubleheader.”

What? The man who signed for everybody was blowing me off. But I came back between games anyway.

The ball in Cal’s locker was covered in writing, including a joke his dad used about injuries. Ripken had made it personal.

Now Drew is married with kids. He’s an Orioles fan. And that ball is on the mantelpiece in his living room.

Like Larsen making grown-ups leap or Sievers showing how a modest man becomes a hero by waiting for a lost child, the baseball generations, the legacy, turned again with that Cal ball.

Thanks to my wonderful wife, Wendy, for 40 years of incredible patience.

Red Smith was once asked how long it took to write a column. He said, “How long do I have?”

That’s me, too. Like Red, I think that writing is rewriting, rethinking and rewriting again until the clock rips the copy out of your hands. Wendy endured it. Graciously. Though it’s left a thousand dinners cold.

Wendy is a voracious reader. We went to lunch with Roger Angell, fiction editor at the New Yorker for decades and a winner of this BBWAA award himself. I thought we’d talk baseball. But Roger found out that Wendy had read many of the modern fiction writers that he’d edited for years. For the next two hours, Roger never spoke to me again.

Now we come to the 2019 Nationals. Their title, the first for Washington in 95 years, gave generations of fans a chance to revel in what I’d watched so often in other cities — the full seven months to the last game, no matter who won. You can’t know the game’s grip till you’ve ridden the whole roller coaster.

In that title run, the Nats were down to their final out of the season in the wild-card game. Then Juan Soto smashed a liner off closer Josh Hader. A bad hop in right field turned a single into a three-run go-ahead hit. All night, 42,000 fans had drunk beer and soda, and not one fan had suddenly heaved the liquid into the air, unconcerned if it drenched a neighbor. But as that ball rolled far and free, every fan knew the Nats would take the lead. Every human with a cup of anything threw it straight up. The telecast looks like Nats Park is in a rain storm. No cue. Pure joy.

That’s how yet another generation of fans is born.

Thanks also to the teams that lost games for huge stakes, then took grim, proud ownership of their finest effort, even while falling short. The poet Emily Dickinson said, “I like a look of agony because I know it’s true.”

Many people I’ve mentioned today are now in the Hall of Fame. Whether I believe it or not, I’m in a room nearby.

Thanks, baseball. My subject for study and inspiration. My companion, always available when needed, both young and old. My bond with a huge community of others, generations of them, who are gathering here right now.

We’ll share our affection for all that baseball has added to our lives. We will anticipate the fun and surprises still to come. We’ll amble through the Hall of Fame and feel — oh, as I do — grateful.

And now … I think I’ll just … walk it off!

[GeoPoto]

Boswell got us through the loss of the Senators, taught us to admire the Orioles, brought us back to the re-located and rebuilding Nationals, and then kept us grounded as we endured, in classic baseball fashion, four top-tier team flameouts before winning a wild card World Series championship just as our window was closing. Thanks for posting Val.

Sent from my motorola edge 5G UW (2021) using Tapatalk

[doug.goodman]

Beautiful.

[jchcollins]

He was also into cards as a younger man! This is a wonderful article I first saw years ago:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archi...-3c7967a331f8/

[ValKehl]

Originally Posted by jchcollins

He was also into cards as a younger man! This is a wonderful article I first saw years ago:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archi...-3c7967a331f8/

John, thanks for the link to this fantastic Boswell article from 1991, which I'm sure I would have read back then but have no memory of due to my advanced CRS condition. Only a few years befor this article was written, I had resurrected my 1955-1960 childhood baseball card collection and begun collecting again. Thankfully, some years earlier, Mom had called to ask if I wanted my boxes of cards she and Dad had found while cleaning out our their storage area, before tossing them into the trash!