DUNEDIN, Fla. -- Canadian baseball has lost a broadcasting giant. Rodger Brulotte, one of the voices of Montreal Expos baseball alongside Jacques Doucet and later Denis Casavant, who went on to call Toronto Blue Jays games in French, has died. He was 79.
Most recently, Brulotte and Casavant had been the Blue Jays’ official French-language broadcast booth for TVA Sports. During the Blue Jays’ 2025 run, Brulotte had to step away from the booth to undergo surgery to remove a tumor from his spine.
“If you ask anybody in Quebec, Rodger is Mr. Baseball,” Casavant said during the World Series run. “He’s the most recognizable. His name and his voice are associated with baseball.”
French Canadians have known Brulotte for generations, and Blue Jays fans surely remember one of his famous calls, even if it happened in an exhibition game.
In 2018, when Vladimir Guerrero Jr. was still just the “next big thing” and not yet the superstar we’ve come to know, the Blue Jays played an exhibition game at Olympic Stadium against the Cardinals on March 27, 2018. Obviously, the buzz leading into this game was the homecoming of the young star, Guerrero, who’d actually been born in Montreal when his famous father was playing for the Expos.
Guerrero’s walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth was a moment we’ll be re-watching when he retires, years and years from now. On the French-language call was Brulotte, delivering the famous, “Vladimir! Vladimir! Vladimir! Bonsoir! Bonsoir!”
This was a Brulotte trademark which traced all the way back to a walk-off win in 1989, long before even Vlad Sr.’s Major League days. That night in Montreal, former Blue Jays infielder Damaso Garcia walked off the Cincinnati Reds at Stade Olympique with a home run in the bottom of the ninth. The Expos had just erased a 5-1 deficit to walk off with a 6-5 win, and Brulotte shouted, “Da-ma-so! Da-ma-so! Da-ma-so!” three times.
Nearly three decades later, and after calling his father’s greatest moments in Montreal, Brulotte called young Vladdy’s.
Brulotte’s time with the Expos began in 1969 with the scouting department before moving into public relations and eventually the broadcast booth alongside Doucet, who he called games on the radio alongside for 17 seasons. Brulotte eventually moved on to RDS and TVA Sports, and in 2013, was honoured with the Jack Graney Award from the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, given to “a member of the media who has made significant contributions to baseball in Canada through their life’s work.”
Brulotte’s personality could fill any room, a “color guy” in the booth but also outside of it. You’d typically hear Brulotte coming before you first saw him, always ready with questions about the next day’s game and stories about the thousands he’s called before. This spring, Blue Jays camp in Dunedin, Fla., was a quieter place without Brulotte making his annual visit to catch up on the team ahead of a new season, which would have been his 58th in Major League Baseball since joining the Expos all those years ago.
Bonsoir, Rodger.