Joe Castiglione, a radio announcer for the Boston Red Sox for 41 years, won the Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick Award on Wednesday for excellence in broadcasting. This means that the voice of Expos Jacques Doucet was once again ignored for the prestigious award.
Castiglione, who announced the Red Sox’s four World Series victories after an 86-year drought, will be honored during Hall of Fame Induction Weekend July 19-22 in Cooperstown, N.S. York.
Castiglione began working with the Red Sox radio team in 1983 and worked with Bob Starr, Dave O’Brien, Jerry Trupiano and Will Flemming, while teaching broadcast journalism at Northeastern, Franklin Pierce and Emerson.
PHOTO CHARLES KRUPA, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES
Joe Castiglione
He was chosen by the 15 members of the Pantheon’s Frick Prize committee. Also on the ballot were Joe Buck, Gary Cohen, Jacques Doucet, Tom Hamilton, Ernie Johnson Sr, Ken Korach, Mike Krukow, Duane Kuiper and Dan Shulman.
Doucet ignored
Jacques Doucet therefore once again finds himself short, despite an exceptional career that spans seven decades.
HAS The Press, Doucet became the first journalist assigned to daily coverage of the Expos when Montreal was awarded a National League franchise in May 1968. He follows the team to
The Press from the first Expos game in New York on April 8, 1969 until the end of the 1972 season.
But it was another medium, radio, which would define it. He acted as an analyst for Expos games once a week on station CKLM from the second half of the 1969 season. He made the jump for good in 1972 when CKAC became the team’s official broadcaster. His voice is broadcast throughout Quebec. He formed a tandem with Rodger Brulotte from 1986. He became an employee of the Expos in 1994 and continued to describe the games until 2003, then at 98.5 FM in 2004, the last season of the Expos in Montreal before the transfer from the Montreal concession to Washington.
Doucet also entered the collective imagination of the province by helping to create the Quebec lexicon of baseball expressions.
The end of major baseball in Quebec did not extinguish the flame of the seasoned commentator, who left for Quebec to describe the games of the Capitals, of the Can-Am league, from 2006 to 2011. This is the period during which he co-signed with the author Marc Robitaille the monumental Once upon a time there were Exposa 1,400-page book that has become the reference work on the history of the Montreal team.
He returned to service with Rodger Brulotte at RDS, then at TVA, describing Toronto Blue Jays games. He described more than 5,500 games during his career and was named to the Quebec and Canadian baseball halls of fame.