Bisher is Spink Award runner-up in closest balloting
Longtime Tigers beat writer Tom Gage won the J.G. Taylor Spink Award on Tuesday over Furman Bisher, the late, great Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist, in the closest balloting in the history of the award by the Baseball Writers Association of America.
Gage, a Detroit News beat writer for 36 years, received 167 votes from the record 463 ballots cast by BBWAA members, while Bisher received 161 votes and Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy was third with 134.
The award is presented to a writer for “meritous contributions to baseball writing” and the winner honored during the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s induction weekend in July at Cooperstown, N.Y. The winner’s name engraved on a plaque in a special exhibit at the Hall of Fame.
The six-vote margin easily eclipsed the previous closest vote in the 66-year history of the award, a 33-vote difference between winner Hal McCoy and Murray Chass in 2002. Peter Gammons was third in the balloting that year, and both Chass and Gammons won the award in subsequent years.
Bisher was also second in the balloting a year ago, behind Roger Angell, famous for his baseball essays in The New Yorker.
Bisher wrote more than 15,000 columns in 59 years at the Journal-Constitution. He didn’t stop writing a regular AJC column until one month before his 91st birthday, and was 93 when he died from a heart attack in 2012.
Bisher was a driving force in bringing the Braves to Atlanta in 1966. He got the first tell-all interview with Shoeless Joe Jackson about the 1919 Black Sox scandal, and sipped sweet tea with Ty Cobb on Cobb’s porch before writing about the fiery, controversial player known as the Georgia Peach.
Bisher wrote the first autobiography of Hank Aaron in 1968, and covered 50 World Series including five involving the Braves.
“Having my career overlap with Furman Bisher’s is just one of those things that I appreciate more and more as the years go by,” said former Braves slugger Dale Murphy, a two-time National League MVP in 1982-1983. “Having had the chance to be interviewed by Furman, and be mentioned somewhere in the volumes of his great work, is something that I consider a great honor.”
