MONTREAL -- For more than three decades, Jacques Doucet was the French-language radio voice of Major League Baseball.

Many Montreal baby boomers grew up listening to his mellifluous descriptions of lanceurs staring into home plate, frappeurs swinging for the fences and voltigeurs tracking down fly balls at la piste d'avertissement, or warning track.

But the Expos migrated south and started playing this spring as the Washington Nationals -- the first move by a major-league team since the Washington Senators became the Texas Rangers 33 years earlier. That meant the disappearance of big-league baseball in French from North American airwaves.

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 Societe du Parler francais 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 demarcation 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 fleche (an "arrow," or line drive) into the right-center field allee, 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).

Mr. Doucet, "created the perfect words" to bring the action to life, says Jean Lapointe, a popular Quebec entertainer who is now a member of Canada's Senate. "The quality of his language in French was incredible," says Mr. Lapointe, who used to have aides record games during his stage performances so he could listen to them later.

Sometimes, when groping for the right phrase, the broadcasters would ask listeners for suggestions. When Mr. Doucet and then-commentator Claude Raymond, a former big-league pitcher, couldn't come up with a good translation for "pickoff attempt," a University of Montreal professor came to the rescue with tentative de prendre a contre-pied, Mr. Doucet says. (That translates literally as "attempt to catch on the wrong foot.")

Beyond coining particular terms, however, Mr. Doucet's special talent lay in depicting baseball in French that "seemed so natural" that "it just worked," says Marc Robitaille, the author of "Un ete sans point ni coup sur," ("No-hit, No-run Summer"), a 2004 novel about a youngster captivated by baseball during the Expos' early days.

Baseball's 1994 labor stoppage, which led to the breakup of what had been a National League-leading Expos team, marked "the burial" of the franchise, says Montreal anthropologist Serge Bouchard. Still, he says, baseball retains a "very big place" in the "profoundly American" culture of French Canadians.

Even as attendance dwindled inside gloomy Olympic Stadium during the past decade, Mr. Doucet's accounts of the action remained part of summer's rhythm for thousands of listeners.

"For some people, summer is a Carlos Jobim song, the singing of birds or the murmur of streams; for me, summer is the voice of Jacques Doucet," mused Stephane Laporte in a column for Montreal's La Presse newspaper, as the Expos' demise began to look inevitable three years ago. "I won't miss millionaire players" or owners, he wrote. "But I'll miss the voice of Jacques Doucet for a long time."

In recent years, Internet users from France to Russia to Japan also tuned in, often peppering Mr. Doucet and his broadcast partner with emailed comments and questions.

A group of loyal fans mounted an email campaign to nominate Mr. Doucet for the Hall of Fame's annual broadcasting award for 2005, but the effort fell short. A Hall of Fame spokesman in Cooperstown, N.Y., says Mr. Doucet finished in the top 10 in online fan voting, with "a few thousand votes," but wasn't among the top three who made the final ballot.

Mr. Bouchard, the anthropologist, says Mr. Doucet belongs in "the same category" as iconic U.S. announcers such as the Los Angeles Dodgers' Vin Scully.

Now, at 65, Mr. Doucet is spending the first spring in 36 years in Montreal keeping tabs on baseball from his tidy suburban home. He writes articles for newspaper advertising supplements, on topics such as kitchen renovations, while trying to line up new work -- perhaps as a translator and voice-over man for sports documentaries.

Montreal's French cable sports channel is picking up one or two major-league games a week, using studio-based commentators. And some amateur and independent-league games elsewhere in Quebec are carried on radio. But le baseball majeur is absent from the radio, the medium of choice for baseball purists across North America. The Toronto Blue Jays don't have a French-language radio broadcaster.

Mr. Doucet says he once looked forward to the day when he would pass the microphone to a younger broadcaster he had groomed. But "it didn't happen," he says wistfully. "I'm sorry I didn't get the chance to hand off the baton."