Thomas Boswell speaks at the Baseball Hall of Fame on Saturday in Cooperstown, New York.
I am grateful to Senator Emilie F. Miller (34th District, Virginia Senate) for highly recommending this excellent article about Thomas Boswell in The Washington Post (July 27, 2025).
Here is a brief excerpt.
To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain complete subscription information, please click here.
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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.
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After all these years, baseball is about generations. We don’t play the game. We replay the memories — together
(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.
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Here is a link to the complete article.
Education: Amherst College, BA in English literature