NEW YORK — Dick Kaegel, who covered the St. Louis Cardinals and Kansas City Royals and edited The Sporting News during a career of more than 53 years, has won the Hall of Fame’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award for meritorious contributions to baseball writing. He will be honored during induction weekend from July 23-26 in Cooperstown, New York.
Kaegel will receive the Spink award along with the late Nick Cafardo of The Boston Globe during a double ceremony on July 24. Cafardo was the 2020 Spink winner, and the 2020 inductions were postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Derek Jeter and Larry Walker will be inducted July 25 along with any players chosen in this year’s voting by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, which will be announced Jan. 26.
Kaegel received 183 of 374 ballots in voting announced Tuesday in the annual election by writers who have been BBWAA members for 10 or more consecutive years.
Marty Noble of Newsday in New York and The Record in New Jersey received 115 votes. Baseball America founder Allan Simpson got 73.
Kaegel, 81, wrote for the Granite City Press-Record in Illinois in 1964 and spent 12 years covering the Cardinals for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and more than two decades covering the Royals for The Kansas City Star. He edited The Sporting News from 1979 to 1985 and spent more than two decades covering the Royals for MLB.com. He covered all 162 games in 2011, four years after a liver transplant.