Sportscaster Who Quit After Antigay Slur Now Covers High School Games

Sportscaster Thom Brennaman, who resigned his gig as Cincinnati Reds announcer last year after being caught using an antigay slur on the air, will soon be back in the broadcast booth.

But Brennaman will be doing high school sports instead of Major League Baseball. He's going to be covering those events in the Cincinnati area for Chatterbox Sports, a subscription-based broadcast service, Cincinnati newspaper The Enquirer reports.

Brennaman had been announcing Reds games on TV for Fox Sports Ohio for several years when, last August, he was caught on a hot mike referring to an unidentified locale as "one of the fag capitals of the world." The remark came just before a game between the Reds and the Kansas City Royals.

During the game, after learning the comment had been broadcast, he offered an apology but interrupted it to report that the Reds' Nick Castellanos had hit a home run. The Reds quickly suspended him, with the support of Fox Sports Ohio, and he published a letter of apology in The Enquirer, saying he intended to learn more about LGBTQ+ issues. But a month later he resigned.

In a Twitter video announcing his new job Tuesday, he said, "I'm so grateful and excited. I grew up here in greater Cincinnati. I know what high school football, high school basketball, and high school sports mean to this area. This is what I was doing at Channel 5 when my career started. Here we are coming full circle getting back out to high school sports." He ended with a reference to the 2020 incident: "By the way, I think Castellanos just hit a home run to left."

Brennaman is the son of Hall of Fame broadcaster Marty Brennaman, who announced Reds games on the radio for years. Marty Brennaman got some criticism in 2011 over the use of "queer," when he said the president of Marshall University in West Virginia "must be queer for softball," as the university had a new softball stadium but no stadium for the baseball team. The elder Brennaman said his remark had nothing to do with gay people.