As When the Expos Left, So Did ‘Lanceurs’ And ‘Voltigeurs’ explains, French-Canadian announcers created a new French vocabulary for baseball:
Mr. Doucet and other announcers from the Expos’ early days were more than just broadcasters. They also helped hone modern French baseball lingo, polishing terminology that had been adapted from English over the course of a century.A 1935 French-English lexicon put out by the Société du Parler français au Canada rendered the game, literally if awkwardly, as jeu de balle aux buts, and featured such quaint translations as batteur risque-tout (literally, daredevil batter) for ‘slugger’ and gardien de but, (goalkeeper) for ‘baseman.’
In 1969, the Expos’ first season, the brewery sponsoring the team hosted a symposium for journalists and commentators to hash out terminology for le baseball. The recommendations included such colorful and enduring turns of phrase as balle papillon (butterfly ball) for ‘knuckleball’ and vol-au-sol (theft at the ground) for ‘shoestring catch.’
But in a game of tactical nuance and long pauses, it often fell to the radio play-by-play men to figure out how best to paint word pictures in respectable French. Over the decades, Mr. Doucet, a former newspaper reporter who switched to broadcasting in 1972, became the acknowledged master of that art.
When Mr. Doucet described infielders moving to serrer les lignes de démarcation in the late innings of a close game, listeners would envision the players hugging the foul lines to guard against an extra-base hit. And if a frappeur de puissance (as sluggers are now known) hit a flèche (an ‘arrow,’ or line drive) into the right-center field allée, listeners held their breath to hear whether the coureur (base-runner) would round third base and file vers le marbre (dash toward the ‘marble,’ or home plate).