Alibert: An interview with Expos broadcaster Jacques Doucet
From SABR member Gaetan Alibert at Honus.fr on December 13, 2012, with SABR member Jacques Doucet:
I went to meet a baseball legend, the French voice of the Montreal Expos from 1969 to 2004, Jacques Doucet.
Jacques Doucet is well known to baseball fans from the 1970s to the 2000s, those who liked to listen to a game of MLB in French, a rarity in the history of baseball! Jacques Doucet broadcasted Montreal Expos games from 1969 to 2004, until the franchise left Montreal and moved to become the Washington Nationals. It was the first franchise created outside the United States,sSo it was a franchise especially appreciated by baseball fans in France during that period … and again today.
Jacques Doucet broadcasted more than 5,500 major baseball games, including two perfect games (including that of Dennis Martinez in 1991 for the Expos). He even became an employee of the franchise in late 1994. He retired in 2005 after the team moved. But his retirement was short-lived because in 2006 he began broadcasting some Quebec Capitals game in the independent Can-Am League. He served in that position until August 2011, when he joined TVA Sports to comment on games with the Toronto Blue Jays Rodger Brulotte. At 72, he seems indestructible for the pleasure of speaking ears of amateur baseball.
This journalist’s busy career began in Montreal in 1968, when he began covering the Expos for the newspaper La Presse. His career led him to be inducted into Quebec’s Baseball Hall of Fame Baseball in 2002 and that of the Canadian Baseball Expos in 2003. This year, he narrowly failed, for the sixth time, to be honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown with the Ford C. Frick Award given annually to a media personality rewarding work for baseball. It is only a postponement as his contribution to baseball, especially with the Expos, is important. Doucet has published three books on baseball, the last two being the Volume 1 and 2 of a book co-written with Marc Robitaille.
Click here to read the full article (translated into English by Google Translate)
To view the original article in French, click here: http://www.honus.fr/entretien-avec-la-voix-des-expos-jacques-doucet
Originally published: December 13, 2012. Last Updated: June 18, 2020.