Jacques Doucet, the “Voice of the Expos,” dies at 86

Jacques Doucet, the longtime French-language play-by-play broadcaster for the Montreal Expos and a cornerstone of baseball’s French presence, has died at 86. His daughter, Martine Doucet, confirmed the death. Doucet became known as the “Voice of the Expos,” a nickname that reflected not just longevity, but the cultural familiarity he built while calling the game for 33 years.

The Expos were folded into baseball history when Major League Baseball later moved the franchise to Washington, but Doucet’s work remained tied to Montreal’s identity as a place where the sport could be followed in French with the same richness as in English. MLB’s remembrance of Doucet highlighted how he played a pivotal role in popularizing the French vocabulary used to describe baseball, helping standardize a way to talk about pitching, hitting, and the rhythm of innings in a language that, before his era, was often treated as secondary in MLB coverage.

Doucet’s career spanned multiple chapters of the team’s life in Montreal, with his voice becoming part of the ordinary texture of the season. The league’s tribute noted that, beyond his on-air role, he carried the game to audiences as more than play-by-play. He helped make baseball feel speakable and shareable, especially for French-speaking viewers who wanted the details, not just the highlights.

In 2024, Doucet revealed he was battling Alzheimer’s disease, according to the MLB announcement. The league did not disclose a cause of death. The absence of further medical detail did not diminish the clarity of what his final public years represented: the challenge of confronting a degenerative illness while having spent a career translating the precision of baseball into a form people could understand and repeat.

MLB also described how teams honored him with a moment of silence before a recent game. The announcement specifically noted the Blue Jays held a moment of silence before last Friday’s contest against the Mariners, acknowledging Doucet’s national footprint beyond any single market. That kind of league-wide recognition is often reserved for figures whose influence reaches fans who never sat in their home radio chairs or watched the broadcast channel they first learned the sport from.

As baseball continues to globalize, Doucet’s story underscores how broadcasting can do cultural work that outlasts the franchise itself. His legacy is not only measured in years, but in the language he normalized and the familiarity he created for French-speaking viewers who learned baseball terms through his calls. For many fans, a broadcaster’s voice becomes a map of the game, and Doucet helped draw that map in French at a time when that map was still taking shape.

What to watch next is how MLB and broadcasters across Canada and beyond will continue commemorating Doucet’s role. In the short term, expect more tributes from media outlets and former colleagues, as well as renewed attention to the enduring role of French-language coverage in MLB’s Canadian footprint. In the longer term, Doucet’s example may continue to shape how the league and its partners think about language accessibility, because the sport, for him, was never only what happened on the field. It was also how the game could be understood, named, and shared.