July 24, 2021

Cooperstown. N.Y. will stage its Awards Presentation Saturday afternoon. The Hall of Fame will honour 2021 Ford C. Frick Award winner for broadcasting excellence, Al Michaels, and the 2020 Frick Award winner, Ken Harrelson; the 2021 Baseball Writers’ Association of America Career Excellence Award winner, Dick Kaegel, and the 2020 BBWAA Career Excellence Award winner, Nick Cafardo; and the 2020 Buck O’Neil Lifetime Achievement Award winner, David Montgomery. It will be a TV-only event broadcast on MLB Network. In 2020, both the Induction Ceremony and Awards Presentation were cancelled due to the pandemic. This is the fifth in a series of articles paying tribute to the winners that will be honoured in the ceremony this Saturday.

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Read the first in our Cooperstown award series: Shenk: Beloved Montgomery Buck O'Neil winner

Read the second in our Cooperstown award series: Hirdt: Al Michaels, 2021 Frick winner

Read the third in our Cooperstown award series: Pierzynski: Ken “Hawk” Harrelson, 2020 Frick winner

Read the fourth in our Cooperstown award series: Abraham: Nick Cafardo, 2020 BBWAA Career Excellence Award

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By Rick Hummel

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Were it not for Dick Kaegel, I would not have had the opportunity to win the Career Excellence Award for writing in 2006 as voted on by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.

I had been a backup ball writer to Dick for several years at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch when Dick became assistant sports editor and suggested I take over for him.

I said I wasn’t sure about it and he said, “Why don’t you do it for the rest of the year and let me know?.” He knew I could do it and by the end of the season, I knew it, too. But without his confidence in me, it would have been harder.

What is harder is to try to understand why it took us so long to honour Mr. Kaegel, who is 81 years old now. Not only did he cover baseball fairly and with a bit of whimsy for the Post-Dispatch but he also was editor of The Sporting News, a columnist for the now defunct St. Louis Globe-Democrat, a ball writer for the Kansas City Star and then for mlb.com.

It was at his last-named employer where he made his greatest accomplishment.

In 2011, he covered all 162 Royals games.

Big deal, right?

How about doing it just four years after having liver transplant surgery that saved his life?

I marveled at how easily Dick maneuvered his way through a clubhouse, how clean his copy always was and how everybody liked him, even those he had criticized. A true professional in every sense of the word and I’m proud to call him a pal. Or “pally,” as we really like to call ourselves.

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Rick Hummel, or Commish or Mr. Rickey, as he is known from press boxes from Montreal and Toronto to California, was born in Quincy, Ill. and this year celebrated his 50th year writing for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Hummel was honoured by the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York in 2007 when he was honoured with the J. G. Taylor Spink Award (since changed to the Baseball Writers’ Association of America Career Excellence Award). A grad of the University of Missouri in 1968, he also worked for the Colorado Springs Free Press-Sun and was hired by Bob Broeg, a BBWAA award winner himself. The press box at Busch Stadium is named the Rick Hummel/Bob Broeg Press Box. Their pictures hang proudly inside the press box.

The first game Hummel ever covered was a 1-0 rain-shortened victory over the Expos in 1983. He serves on the Baseball Hall of Fame Overview Committee, reviewing the careers of potential inductees by the Veterans Committee. He has written three books: One Last Strike: Fifty Years in Baseball, Ten and a Half Games Back, and One Final Championship Season, written with Tony La Russa in 2012; The Commish and the Cardinals: The Most Memorable Games, as Covered by Hall of Famer Rick Hummel for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2007 and Tom Seaver’s Scouting Notebook written with Tom Seaver and Bob Nightengale in 1989.

He was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2008, is a three-time Missouri Sportswriter of the Year, selected by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association and a member of the Quincy High School Blue Devils Hall of Fame. He remains a fan of the Missouri, the St. Louis Billikens and the Wake Forest Demon Deacons.