Earlier this month, Jason Aldean joined a select group of country artists who have been named ACM Artist of the Decade. Jason, who is a three-time ACM Entertainer of the Year and 14-time ACM Award winner, is now in the company of past winners Marty Robbins (1969), Loretta Lynn (1979), Alabama (1988), Garth Brooks (1998) and George Strait (2008).

As Jason told Kix Brooks of American Country Countdown, he was “blown away” when he learned he had been named ACM Artist of the Decade. In fact, Jason, a longtime baseball fan, used a classic baseball idiom to describe his surprise, saying the honor “came out of left field.”

“We had been in the studio working on a new album, and my manager came over and kind of pulled me outside and goes, ‘I need to talk to you,’ and I thought, ‘Man, what did I do now?’” says Jason. “That was kind of the first thing that popped into my head, and he goes, ‘You know, they’re giving away the Artist of the Decade Award this year at the ACMs, and they just voted you to be the one to get it,’ and I was completely blown away. I guess more so just because . . . they clearly don’t give it out every year. It’s every 10 years, so it wasn’t even on my radar that it was coming up or that it was a thing, you know? It really came out of left field for me. There are a lot of artists I think are very worthy of the award, so for us to be the ones to get that, and people think enough of us to vote us in and feel like that we should have that, it means a lot to me.”

Here’s a fun fact: the five previous winners of the ACM Artist of the Decade Award have all been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.