Meet the O's minor league broadcasters: Today, Norfolk's Pete Michaud

Veteran Tides announcer is entering his 18th season with Norfolk

Now 62, Pete Michaud has had a long and strong career in broadcasting and has called hundreds and hundreds of minor league baseball and hockey games over decades.

He even once called a few Orioles games.

Since 2007 – incidentally also the Orioles first year with Norfolk as their Triple affiliate – Pete has been the radio play-by-play voice of the Tides. He’s seen every season of the team’s run as an O’s affiliate and the 2025 season will be his 18^th year as Tides’ broadcaster.

Part of a family with ties to the Navy, Pete was born in Norfolk. His family moved around some in his youth and then found their way back to Norfolk in southeastern Virginia.

I first met Pete sometime around 1987 or 1988 when I was hired to work as Sports Director of the Virginia News Network based in Richmond, Va. Pete then was with WTAR Radio in Norfolk, a VNN affiliate, where Bob Rathbun was the lead sports guy. Now Rathbun is the TV voice of the Atlanta Hawks. Back then he hired Pete to broadcast Old Dominion University women’s basketball and back him up when he worked television games, missing ODU’s men’s radio games.

Pete’s early days at WTAR also included work providing fishing reports. He took over those duties from someone that now is one of the biggest names in MLB broadcasting.

“I succeeded Gary Cohen at WTAR doing the weekend fishing reports,” Michaud recalled. “Of course Gary is a fixture in New York (as TV voice for the Mets) for the last 30 years or so. He was at WTAR and left I think for the Pawtucket Red Sox job and I took over the fishing reports from Gary.”

A few years later Michaud would be casting a line in a baseball booth.

His first job calling play-by-play was for the St. Louis Cardinals’ A-ball team in the Midwest League in 1992 in Springfield, Ill. He called games for a team that would later send John Mabry and Dmitri Young to the big leagues.

Pete’s career would take him to Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Fla. for a few seasons and then in 1998 to the Triple-A Pacific Coast League to call Iowa Cubs games.

At the same time, he was pulling double duty, already calling games in Norfolk for the hockey team, the Admirals and he called most of their games save a few seasons, every year from 1990 through 2017. In 2007, former Tides owner Ken Young bought both Norfolk teams in hockey and baseball and Pete began broadcasting for both.

His first two years with the Tides in 2007 and 2008 saw him working as the club’s No. 2 broadcaster to the lead guy, Bob Socci, who is now the voice of the New England Patriots.

So Pete’s career path is linked to current announcers in MLB, the NBA and the NFL.

With the Tides, Pete saw an O’s farm that had a few tough years and then rose to become the No. 1 farm system in the sport for several seasons.

One day Michaud might be talking to a player at Harbor Park. The next he might be watching that same player in the majors on television.

“That is the great thing about Triple-A,” he said. “I have worked in Single-A ball and you might see a player make it several years down the road. But here we can see a guy one day and I may go to the park the next afternoon and not see him. He’s on his way to Baltimore and a few hours later you watch him play at Camden Yards, or Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium. That is the fun part about Triple-A.”

Michaud (pronounced Mish-shoe) takes a few games off each year but otherwise calls every inning of every Tides game, most as a solo act.

Being from the area, this is the story of a local Norfolk guy that made good.

He’s an Old Dominion University grad from 1986 and before that attended Norfolk’s Indian River High School, which produced the likes of Alonzo Mourning, Ricky Rudd and William Fuller.

Michaud says his broadcasting style has not changed much over the years but notes that of course the technology is vastly different now and so is the access to volumes of information. Much different from his early days when he would clip stories out of newspapers and file them for the broadcast.

“When I started we didn’t have computers. I had a file box and would have a file on every team and I would lug that thing around with me. Now it’s so much easier. There are times I’m on air calling the game while also googling something to find information. But in terms of calling a game, it’s still baseball and not much has changed,” he said.

“The nuts and bolts of broadcasting, I don’t think has changed a whole lot from Vin Scully and Red Barber to Joe Buck and Joe Davis and the guys doing it now at the highest levels.”

In July of 2017, Pete got the call that all players and broadcasters long for – the one telling him he would go to the majors. He got to call a three-game series at Camden Yards when the O’s hosted Houston on the Orioles Radio Network, working with Ben McDonald.

“My very brief big league career,” he said modestly. But getting to call any big league games puts Pete ahead of lot of others who never got that chance. He showed he could handle himself just fine in the big leagues.

What was that like?

“It was difficult to get comfortable because it was only three games. It takes a while to get in synch with a partner and team when you are not calling their games. But just being there and seeing some of the guys that had been in Norfolk was a lot of fun. Got a lot of reaction from it from people that I knew.

“To say I did that for even a couple of games is a big highlight forever,” said Michaud.

So now, Pete is preparing for another Triple-A season where one thing is pretty much certain on the farm – constant roster changes. Players come and go fast, some go up to Baltimore or back to Double-A. On the farm broadcasters print a new roster for each game because it may be different almost every day. It’s a challenge. Pete has been meeting that one and many others in Norfolk for the Tides since 2007.

I look forward to hearing him call games this year for the Tides.

A series of stories: I plan to write about the broadcasters for the O’s four full-season affiliates over the next two weeks, so be looking out for more on the guys behind the mic.

Here is a sample of Pete’s work as he called plays from a couple current O’s when they were Tides.