Al Michaels

Alan Richard Michaels

• School Arizona State University
• High School Alexander Hamilton High School (Los Angeles)

• Born: November 12, 1944 in New York, NY USA

Biographical Information

Al Michaels held his first baseball broadcasting job with the Hawaii Islanders from 1968 to 1970. He then called games for the Cincinnati Reds from 1971 through 1973. After that he moved on to the San Francisco Giants before joining the ABC network. He did the play-by-play broadcast of the World Series for ABC every odd-numbered year from 1977 to 1985, a period during which ABC shared the broadcasting rights with NBC. He shared those duties with Keith Jackson, with one broadcaster working the games in National League ballparks, and the other the ones in American League parks. He is best remembered by many for his coverage of the San Francisco earthquake that struck during the 1989 World Series. He was the lead announcer on ABC's Monday Night Baseball from 1976 to 1989, teaming up with Howard Cosell for the first part of that run.

Outside of baseball, Michaels has called Monday Night Football games since 1986. He also was at the mic for the "Miracle on Ice" when the United States topped the Soviet Union in ice hockey at the 1980 Winter Olympics, earning him his first "Sportscaster of the Year" Award. Michaels has won nine Emmy Awards. In December 2020, he was named the winner of the Ford Frick Award for excellence in baseball broadcasting, to be handed out at the 2021 Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

Further Reading

• Richard Justice: "Al Michaels named Frick Award winner", mlb.com, December 9, 2020. [1]
• Al Michaels and L. John Wertheim: You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television, William Morrow, New York, NY, 2014. ISBN 978-0062314963

Related Sites

• Al Michaels at the SABR Bio Project