For the second consecutive year, baseball fans voted overwhelmingly for Joe Nuxhall to be on the ballot for the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasting excellence that was announced Monday by the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Nuxhall and two longtime Canadian broadcasters, Jacques Doucet and Tom Cheek, were the fans' choices for the ballot. Nuxhall, a fixture with the Cincinnati Reds for 53 years as a pitcher and announcer before his death on Nov. 15, 2007, received 19,547 votes from the record total of 145,138 votes cast in the fans' election. Doucet, who spent his entire 34-year career with the Montreal Expos as the play-by-play radio voice on their French language network, received 10,282 votes. Cheek, who died during the 2005 season, his 28th as the Toronto Blue Jays' radio play-by-play man, got 8,992 votes. The other seven candidates nominated by the Frick Award Committee include a Hall of Fame pitcher, Dizzy Dean, who worked Cardinals and Browns games in St. Louis as well as the national "Game of the Week" in the 1950s and '60s. Tony Kubek, also a former player who did "Game of the Week" telecasts in the 1960s and '70s and later worked in the booth for the Blue Jays and New York Yankees, also made the cut. The other nominees are former play-by-play voices Ken Coleman (Cleveland Indians, Cincinnati Reds, Boston Red Sox), Lanny Frattare (Pittsburgh Pirates) and Dave Van Horne (Montreal Expos, Florida Marlins); Spanish radio and TV announcer Billy Berroa (New York Mets) and broadcasting legend Graham McNamee (Westinghouse, NBC), who called 12 World Series beginning in 1923.
