Longtime Boston Red Sox radio voice Joe Castiglione was announced as the winner of the 2024 Ford C. Frick Award Wednesday, which is awarded by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum to one broadcaster each year for excellence in the broadcasting medium.

However, the call from the Hall to Castiglione didn’t exactly go off without a hitch.

During an appearance on WEEI’s Gresh and Fauria after the announcement was made, Castiglione revealed he accidentally hung up on the Baseball Hall of Fame.

“They said, If you are the winner, we’ll call between 10:30 and 12 o’clock on the day of the announcement. If you’re not selected, you will hear nothing’,” Castiglione said. “And this morning, I was watching the clock. I tried to ride the exercise bike and stretch, and all those kinds of things to sort of divert attention. And then at 11:21, that call came in.

People that know me know I’m a technical putz. And when the phone rang, I saw the 607 area code and knew it was Cooperstown. I figured that was the good news. But instead of hitting the speaker button so my family could hear it, I hit the red button that hung up on the call.”

As Gresh and Fauria laughed uproariously, Joe Castiglione explained the torture of the moment.

“It was the most agonizing 40 to 60 seconds for that call to come back that I’ve ever experienced,” he said.

Boston Red Sox radio play-by-play announcer Joe Castiglione has been named the recipient of the 2024 Ford C. Frick Award by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. The longtime Red Sox voice, who has been working on the team’s radio broadcasts for the last 41 seasons, is set to be recognized for his excellence in broadcasting during the Hall of Fame Awards Presentation in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Castiglione was on the ballot with nine other finalists, including Joe Buck, Gary Cohen, Jacques Doucet, Tom Hamilton, Ernie Johnson Sr., Ken Korach, Mike Krukow, Duane Kuiper and Dan Shulman. With the honor, he is the 48th winner of the Award after earning the highest point total among the 15-member voting committee. In order to qualify for the award, one must be an active or retired broadcaster with a minimum of 10 years of continuous major-league broadcast experience either with a ballclub, network or combination thereof.

“Bringing knowledge and passion to the booth every day for more than four decades, Joe Castiglione has given voice to the greatest era of Red Sox success in the broadcast era,” Josh Rawitch, president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, said in a statement. “Starting with the team in 1983 in Carl Yastrzemski’s final season, Joe has connected generations of Red Sox fans with a delivery that has become part of the New England fabric. His calls of the team’s four World Series wins in the past 20 seasons provided fans with memories that will echo forever throughout Red Sox nation.”

After earning an undergraduate degree at Colgate University, Castiglione attended Syracuse University where he gained a master’s degree and worked several on-air broadcasting jobs. Upon his graduation, he began his career in Youngstown, Ohio with WFMJ-TV and went on to move to Cleveland to work for WKYC-TV and began calling Cleveland Indians games in 1979. In 1981, he worked for the Milwaukee Brewers before returning to Cleveland for the 1982 campaign. He joined the Red Sox broadcast team in 1983 and has remained a member ever since.

Castiglione is the longest-tenured broadcaster in the history of the Red Sox and has called various historic moments in team history, including World Series championships, 20-strikeout performances by Roger Clemens and four no-hitters. The home radio booth at Fenway Park was named in his honor in 2022 as part of a special ceremony. Outside of his radio endeavors, he has taught broadcast journalism courses at Emerson College, Franklin Pierce University and Emerson College.

The National Basketball Association is in its penultimate season of media rights deals with The Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros. Discovery, and various reports have affirmed that the league is looking to ink its next deal with broadcast, cable and digital components. The league, led by Commissioner Adam Silver, and its two existing rightsholders have the ability to enter an exclusive 45-day window negotiating period on March 9, 2024. There are other bidders interested as well, which reportedly include Amazon Prime Video, Apple and NBC Sports among others, and there seems to be a collective understanding of the burgeoning reach and growth potential of the Association.

Concurrent with these media rights deals is expansion, a topic that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver was asked about during an interview with Eddie Johnson and Justin Termine on SiriusXM NBA Radio on Tuesday night. With the Oakland Athletics decision to move the franchise to Las Vegas, Nev., the market has been speculated as being a potential landing spot for an NBA team.

The Las Vegas Aces of the WNBA won their second-consecutive league championship over the summer, preceded by a Stanley Cup victory by the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights. Although Silver divulged that players, former players and well-known wealthy people have expressed interest in having the franchise, he shared that there are no “inside candidates.” He is thrilled about the interest, but knows that in order to move forward, it is incumbent on the league to ink a new media rights deal.

“The reason we wanted to get those deals done, no secret, is we want to have a better understanding of what the economics would be going forward,” Adam Silver said. “So that to the extent, if you have 30 teams; if you’re dividing up your national or international television money by 30 teams, that’s one check that you’re writing the teams. If it’s by – let’s say we expand by two teams [to] 32 teams – that’s a different one.”

Silver recognizes the importance of media revenue and how it impacts the operations of the league and its member teams. At the conclusion of the season, the league will be receiving regional rights back from Diamond Sports Group, part of a term sheet within the cooperation agreement. Yet the regional sports network is facing motions to compel filed by both its parent company, Sinclair, along with Major League Baseball, which are set to be deliberated in a hearing on Dec. 15. While the future of the local rights remains unknown at the moment, Silver wants to have an idea of what the economics within the league would look like going forward before considering these plans.

“We’ll see what the timing is on those national television agreements,” Silver added. “You know, we don’t have to wait till the end of the second season to get those done, but once we do, we’ll turn back to expansion, or turn to expansion.”

The league is in the midst of its first In-Season Tournament, which concludes this week in Las Vegas, Nev. featuring a semifinals doubleheader Thursday night on ESPN and TNT, and the championship game on ABC on Saturday at 8:30 p.m. EST/5:30 p.m. PST. During group play – which took place on Tuesdays and Fridays throughout the month of November – ESPN and TNT had various nationally-televised windows that averaged 1.5 million viewers, up 26% from the comparable window last season. Silver acknowledged that the tournament has been going well and seems to be resonating with fans, but he does not want to jump to any conclusions before its completion.

“I mean, when we first started this people said, ‘What are you going to be looking for to decide whether it’s something that you’ll think will be successful and you’ll want to move forward?,’” Silver reminisced. “And I said, ‘Most importantly, let’s look to the competitiveness of the players; the enthusiasm on the floor; the buy-in, and we’re getting that in spades.”

Termine asked Silver about expanding the NBA Draft to two days, something that the Commissioner confirmed that the league is working on with ESPN/ABC, the broadcast home of the event, along with the NBA Players Association. There remains interest in the players that are being drafted and Silver believes that both rounds deserve to be broadcast in prime time, but he wants to ensure things are worked out with partners and thinks they will get to that point. He went on to call the decision a “no-brainer” because of the interest and how it can guide more comprehensive coverage.

“There’s so much interest in these players,” Silver said. “The other advantage to moving the second round to a separate night just gives more time for the announcers like you guys – the media – to have a better understanding of who those players are. A little bit more time between picks to talk about who they are and why they make sense for those teams.”

There have been several star NBA players who have been selected in the second round of the event in recent years, including Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokić and Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green. Various second-round prospects from this year’s draft, such as Toumani Camara and Andre Jackson Jr., have already made an impact on their respective teams. Rather than these selections being announced after midnight on the east coast, Silver postulates the value another day would bring to the sport.

“I’m hoping to get there actually for this season – for this June – and move the second round to its own night,” Silver said.