Jacques Doucet: Broadcasting Baseball North of the Border

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in SABR’s Calling the Game: Baseball Broadcasting from 1920 to the Present, published in 2016.

THE EARLY DAYS

By 1968, Montreal had been without professional baseball for nearly a decade since the Montreal Royals of the International League moved to Syracuse at the end of the 1960 season. But interest still lingered among baseball fans, since both English and French newspapers in Canada’s largest city carried daily stories about the major leagues.

When the Expos were born in 1969, the fans could not wait to see in person the stars they had heretofore only read about or watched from time to time on television. Dave Van Horne, who’d cut his teeth in the Atlanta Braves farm system, and Russ Taylor, a well known Montreal broadcaster, were the first on-air talent the club hired. Jean-Pierre Roy, a former star pitcher with the Royals, and Jean-Paul Sarault, a writer with the Montreal-Matin newspaper, were soon brought on as the Expos’ first French-language broadcasting team.

I was at that time a sportswriter for La Presse, following the daily activities of the Expos. In addition, I was one of four official scorers hired by the National League, although my only experience in the game had been as a writer covering junior baseball in the Montreal area.

About half way through the 1969 season, the Expos realized they needed a “pinch-broadcaster” to replace J.P. Roy when he left the radio booth to act as analyst on the SRC (French CBC) telecasts. The people who initially tried their hand at filling Roy’s spot on radio did not seem to satisfy the Expos, and Sarault suggested that I should be given an opportunity to do so.

I was fortunate enough that my editor at La Presse, Gerry Champagne, was a diehard baseball fan; in addition, since I was writing for an afternoon newspaper, I did not have an early deadline for my game stories. So my editor gave me permission to pinch-hit on radio once a week. Three years later, the Expos offered me the full-time broadcasting job.

WORKING THE GAME

In my first year, 1972, I worked with Jean-Pierre Roy. At the end of the season, he moved to the O’Keefe Brewery (the Expos’ main sponsor) and kept his job as a TV analyst. I strongly recommended that Claude Raymond, a former major league pitcher with the White Sox, Braves, Astros, and finally the Expos, be hired for radio duties, and we worked together for 12 seasons. I also worked with Rodger Brulotte for 17 seasons and Marc Griffin for the last three campaigns.

Working with Claude, who was just out of uniform, was a great help for me, since he knew almost every player in the National League. So we split our pregame activities, with Claude handling the players while I mostly talked with managers, coaches, and general managers.

Every bit of information was shared before each broadcast and, since we were both new to the broadcasting business, we met after each road game to discuss how we handled the flow of the game, discarding what we felt was not right and insisting on what we thought was more interesting for the listener. And we eventually used more and more French expressions during our broadcasts.

In order to improve my broadcasting techniques, I used to carry a small transistor radio on the road in order to listen to some of my favorite baseball announcers. I handled the play-by-play portion of our broadcasts for the first and last three innings and Claude pitched in for the middle three innings. So it allowed me to listen to Hall of Famers like Vin Scully of the Dodgers and Harry Kalas of the Astros and Phillies. Listening to those broadcasting greats, who later became good friends, was a big help.

Mentioning Vin Scully leads me to recall that once in Vero Beach, during spring training, I was talking with Vin when a fan asked him to pose for a picture. As I started to move away so the fan could have a picture of him, Vin said to the fan, “Take the picture of the two of us. This is Jacques Doucet, young French broadcaster of the Expos, a good friend of mine.” I never forgot that moment.

Vin also invited me on the Dodger telecast once to broadcast a couple of innings in French, which was a great honor.

CALLING PERFECTION

In working with Claude Raymond, I had one thing to settle at the very start of our relationship.

Knowing how superstitious professional athletes are, I had to convince him that if a pitcher was working on a no-hitter or a perfect game after four or five innings, that this fact had to be mentioned during our broadcast — which was, after all, a radio broadcast — in order to keep the listener aware of what was happening on the field.

In 1972, my first season with Jean-Pierre Roy, Bill Stoneman pitched his second no-hitter, against the New York Mets, and Jean-Pierre adamantly refused to talk about it until the last out was recorded. He had noted during the game only that “something special” was happening on the field! Being a rookie broadcaster, I did not want to create animosity with my partner.

Once the game was over, I told Jean-Pierre that never again would I refrain from mentioning that a pitcher had a no-hitter or a perfect game going during our broadcast.

And I had, over the 33 years that I spent in the radio booth, the privilege of broadcasting five no-hitters and two perfect games (Dennis Martinez against the Dodgers, in Los Angeles on July 28, 1991, and David Cone against the Expos at Yankee Stadium on July 18, 1999).

On June 3, 1995, Pedro Martínez also pitched nine perfect innings at San Diego before allowing a hit in the bottom of the tenth. He was immediately removed from the game, and was the winning pitcher in Montreal’s 1–0 victory. As far as I am concerned, this was also a perfect game, since a “regular” baseball game is made of 27 outs.

TOUCH ‘EM ALL

I was also privileged to broadcast All-Star, playoff, and World Series games from 1982 through 1995. I’ll never forget Kirk Gibson’s home run against Dennis Eckersley — I can still see him limping around the bases — in the 1988 World Series, or the earthquake that hit San Francisco at 5:04 pm before game three of the 1989 Series, or Joe Carter’s title-clinching homer in 1993.

In Game 6 of that series, with the Blue Jays up three games to two, Carter came to bat with one out in the bottom of the ninth with Toronto trailing 6–5. Rickey Henderson and Paul Molitor were on base. On a 2–2 count, Carter hit a three-run walk-off homer off Phillies pitcher Mitch Williams.

This is still the only time that a home run has been hit by a player whose team was trailing in the bottom of the ninth in a potential championship clincher. As Carter went hysterical, jumping up and down while rounding the bases, my good friend Tom Cheek, the late radio broadcaster for the Blue Jays, shouted, “Touch ’em all, Joe! You’ll never hit a bigger home run in your life!”

Those moments, like many others, are ones that I’ll never forget.

My only regret is that I never had the opportunity to broadcast a World Series game involving the Expos.

JACQUES DOUCET was the voice of the Montreal Expos for 33 seasons from 1972 to 2004. He has been a SABR member since 2005 and a finalist for the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick Award. In 2004 he received the Jack Graney Award presented by the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.