By George Solomon
Thomas Boswell, who spent his entire 52-year professional career at The Washington Post, is the winner of the 2025 Red Smith Award, the Associated Press Sports Editors organization announced March 18.
The award has been presented by APSE for the past 45 years and salutes journalistic excellence and meritorious service to the sports journalism profession. Boswell, 77, will receive the award at APSE’s summer conference in late June in Minneapolis.
“To win an award named for Red Smith – one that has been won by the likes of Smith, Shirley Povich, Jim Murray, and so many other great sports writers, is as great an honor as you can ever hope for,” Boswell said. “At a World Series many years ago, Red Smith and Shirley Povich invited me to join them for dinner after the game. That was a moment for me to think I’d arrived.”
Boswell, a Washington native, began his career at The Washington Post in 1969, working as a news aide after graduation from Amherst College. By 1974, he was covering high school sports and some local colleges when future Washington Post publisher Donald E. Graham, in the middle of a one-year stint as sports editor, promoted Boswell to the baseball beat. Even though Washington had lost its baseball team to Arlington, Texas, in 1972, Boswell began covering the sport, including staffing every World Series from 1975 to 2019.
“I have simply loved Tom Boswell’s columns over the decades,” Graham said. “I feel so lucky that I got to read this great writer describe my teams. I have had the common reaction that even if I saw a game, I couldn’t wait to read Tom’s game story or column – about what I saw. He saw more than I did, and he wrote about it so beautifully.”
Winning the Red Smith Award comes on the heels of Boswell winning the 2025 Baseball Writers Association of America Career Excellence award to be presented at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., at its annual induction weekend in late July.
Boswell was selected to receive the award in voting by past Red Smith Award winners, APSE’s current officers, past APSE presidents, 10-year members, and some alumni members. The five nominees receiving the most votes behind Boswell will automatically return to next year’s ballot – Mark Whicker, Garry D. Howard, Hal Bodley, Dan Shaughnessy, and Terry Pluto.
Boswell has had three anthologies of his work published: “Why Time Begins on Opening Day”; “The Heart of the Order”; and “How Life Imitates the World Series.”
The Athletic’s Jayson Stark, on learning of Boswell’s recognition in December by the baseball writers, told Spencer Nusbaum of The Washington Post: “Tom Boswell is one of the greatest baseball writers who ever lived and someone my entire time as a baseball writer myself, I have read, looked up to, studied, and genuinely cared about everything he thought.”
Stan Kasten, president of the Los Angeles Dodgers and formerly the top executive of the Washington Nationals, said Boswell could have written well about any subject, but Kasten was delighted he chose baseball.
“We were lucky to have him,” Kasten said.
George Solomon was sports editor of The Washington Post from 1975 to 2003 and a member of the faculty of the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism from 2003 to 2020. He was the founding director of the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism in 2011. He retired in 2020.
