The Scott Garceau Story for the 62nd Induction Banquet Program

The 62nd induction banquet was held on November 9, 2023.

Scott Garceau has endeared himself to Baltimore sports fans for more than 40 years as a TV anchor, play-by-play man, and radio broadcaster who never lost his cool. But there was one night he was tempted.

The year was 1995 and Garceau was leading media coverage of Baltimore’s valiant attempt to get an NFL expansion team 11 years after the Colts left town. That quest had taken Garceau across the country. This night he was in Chicago where the NFL announced that Jacksonville — not Baltimore — would be joining Carolina as an expansion team.

“Carolina was expected — they looked like the hot new market,” Garceau recalls. “But Jacksonville?? The press conference is over and I see Commissioner [Paul] Tagliabue standing onstage. I tell my cameraman to follow me and we go up and I say, ‘Mr. Commissioner, Baltimore has done everything the league has asked. They sold out a Dolphins-Saints preseason game. They’ve got a stadium in place. What do they need to do to get football back?’ That’s when Tagliabue responded, ‘Maybe they’d be better off building a plant or a museum.’ I was incensed.”

Garceau couldn’t punch the commissioner, but he did the next best thing, rushing the feed back to WMAR-TV’s satellite truck to lead that night’s 11 o’clock news. The sound bite immediately went national, forever staining Tagliabue. “In fact,” Garceau says, “the first Ravens game at the new stadium I see a fan wearing a T-shirt saying, ‘Hey Tagliabue, how do you like our museum?’ with a picture of the stadium. That was so good.”

It's just one of countless things Garceau, 72, has done for the Baltimore sports community. Sports anchor at WMAR-TV for 28 years, he served as the Ravens’ play-by-play voice their first 10 seasons and recently completed his 17th season broadcasting Orioles games (1981-92, 2020-23). He spent 12 years co-hosting 105.7 The Fan on radio.

Funny thing is Garceau almost didn’t come to Baltimore at all. “I was looking to get into a major market after jobs in Michigan and Albuquerque and a spot opened in Seattle. After my second interview I felt confident but didn’t get the job. A friend with CBS Sherm Eagan said there’s an opening in Baltimore but I was feeling sorry for myself and said ‘I don’t want to go through all that again.’ Sherm said ‘just send them the damn tape.’ So I did, and here I am 43 years later.”

Favorite memories include covering the Orioles 1983 World Series champions and doing play-by-play for the 2000 Ravens Super Bowl champions. “I came to Baltimore eyes wide open,” Garceau says. “I’m covering major league baseball and that bunch with Palmer and Eddie and Cal. Then the Ravens season, this group with a suffocating defense they go five games without scoring a touchdown and win the Super Bowl. What a crazy ride!”

But Garceau also embraced amateur sports. Dunbar-Calvert Hall basketball. The Battle of Baltimore with local college basketball teams. The college lacrosse game of the week. The Turkey Bowl, a high school football tradition “that’s been part of my life since I got here in 1980. Back then you couldn’t get that coverage other places. People loved that stuff, and we at WMAR went after it. Local sports was our niche.”

What sport was the toughest to call? “Lacrosse because I didn’t play it.” The strangest? “Calling Orioles road games on monitors from an empty Camden Yards during COVID.”

Garceau did play baseball, basketball, and football growing up in Michigan. Once he realized he wasn’t major league caliber, he looked to stay close to sports. “My dad was an underground iron miner and he told me I didn’t want to do that.” Broadcasting proved Scott’s outlet. He started out in radio doing high school games where Tom Izzo, the Hall of Fame coach for Michigan State, and Steve Mariucci, the former NFL coach, were guards on the Iron Mountain basketball team.

Once he got to Baltimore there were more Hall of Fame people. Sharing a broadcast booth with Brooks Robinson. Filling in for Chuck Thompson to call his first Orioles game. Covering for, but not replacing, Jon Miller when he had national games to call. “You don’t replace guys like them, you just do the job after them,” Garceau says.

And then there was Vince Bagli, the folksy “dean” of Baltimore sports on WBAL-TV. “We became good friends and golfed together a lot. He was a great role model about how to treat people.”

Garceau learned his people lessons well, says Keith Mills, his sports partner for nearly 20 years at WMAR. “Scott was a great mentor to so many of the young kids that came into WMAR at that time and I was one of them,” Mills says. “He also took care of the sports producers, the editors, the photographers. My father once told me ‘take care of the people who take care of you’ and Scott epitomized that. Always a class act.”

The Fallston resident, who has been married to Georgeanna for 49 years and has two daughters and four grandkids, also has given back through his charity work including starting a lupus walk in Baltimore that has raised over a million dollars.

He is humbled to be receiving the John F. Steadman Lifetime Achievement Award from the Maryland State Athletic Hall of Fame because he respected the longtime Baltimore newspaper columnist. “Before I got here I knew who John Steadman was,” Garceau recalls. “I grew up with the Packers and Bart Starr in northern Michigan. John and I would talk a lot about the Packers and the Colts. He loved the history of the game.”

Garceau is eager to join the “duckpin bowlers, badminton players and power boaters” in the Hall of Fame. “I’ll be thinking about how lucky I’ve been. How well Baltimore has treated me and my family for 40 years. Teams, players, coaches, fellow workers, but most of all the people that have watched and listened. It’s been terrific.” 

Back of Class of 2023 Inductees Page