Former Jays broadcaster Howarth up for Frick award

Basketball connections helped set Jerry Howarth on a path to the baseball big leagues, a journey that included a 36-year run as a radio broadcaster for the Toronto Blue Jays.

Howarth recently was rewarded for his broadcasting excellence with a nomination for the 2023 Ford Frick Award.

The winner of the annual honour from the National Baseball Hall of Fame will be announced today.

“Winning is not important to me,” Howarth said. “Just to be nominated is the honour in and of itself and (something) I'm so appreciative of.”

Before he became a full-time voice with the Blue Jays alongside Tom Cheek in 1982, Howarth called minor-league games for the Tacoma Twins and Salt Lake City Gulls.

Howarth and Cheek — a duo affectionately known as “Tom and Jerry” — were on the mike as Toronto rose to prominence in the American League East and called the Blue Jays' back-to-back World Series titles in 1992 and 1993.

“I broadcast every game individually as if it were a white, blank canvas,” Howarth said. “I artistically painted it to the best of my ability and then I initialled it in my mind in the lower right-hand corner.”

Cheek, who died in 2005 from brain cancer, won the Frick award in 2013.

Howarth, now 76, retired in early 2018.

“I wish Tom was still here to be a part of this,” said Howarth, who also coached high school basketball in Toronto for more than two decades.

Longtime Montreal Expos broadcaster Jacques Doucet is one of nine other finalists for the Frick Award. He was also nominated for the honour in 2019.

Doucet, a Montreal native, spent 33 years (1969-2004) as the Expos' play-by-play radio voice on their French network.

He returned to the booth in 2012 as the Blue Jays' French-speaking TV voice.