Speaker Jim Deshaies (L) and SABR Chapter Leader Bob Dorrill at the group’s December 2011 meeting.
As you’ve probably heard by now, Jim Deshaies is leaving the Astros in 2013 after several years as the color man to Bill Brown, our very accomplished play-by-play broadcaster on telecasts of the team’s regular season games.
It’s another big loss for Houston on the baseball side of things. “Brownie and JD” were the best in my book when it came to providing all of us a look and feel for each game, balancing baseball data input with a unique capacity for just the right squeeze of humor when attention spans and interest in the actual games began to redundantly thin, especially over the course of two long 100-game losing seasons. If a team cannot win on the field, the team in the broadcast box better be winners at what they do. And we had them with Brownie and JD.
Astros President George Postolos expressed his regrets over the departure of JD for a similar job in Chicago with the Cubs and I believe he was sincere in that regards. We don’t really know why JD has decided to leave what had seemingly become a comfortable job working from home with someone he loved and respected in Bill Brown, but that’s life.
Things happen. More money. The scent of new challenge. A larger stage for his performing talents. Discomfort with all the change he saw going on around him in Houston, including the cold firing of Dave Raymond and Brett Dolan from the Astros radio broadcasting booth. – JD’s reasons for leaving the Astros could have included any and all of these aforementioned factors, plus, or maybe only because of personal reasons we know nothing about.
When I think of Jim Deshaies the pitcher, my mind always goes to two things: (1) his importance to the staff of the great 1986 Astros team, the one that lost that heartbreaking extra inning Game Six to the New York Mets, and (2) that time as an Astros he set n MLB record by striking out the first eight Los Angeles Dodgers he faced in the first and second innings of a game at the Astrodome. JD was “King of the World” that night.
My favorite “color broadcasting moment” always goes back to that early game at Minute Maid Park when the ground crew was still getting used to closing the open roof when a sudden summer rain came up.
On this particular occasion, sideline broadcaster Greg Lucas had taken shelter from the quick rain under a tarp he found attached to a fence that runs behind the Astros dugout. Ever the trooper, Greg was attempting to finish his report from a point of invisibility under the tarp when JD started making an unsuccessful straightaway halt attempt to break from Greg for some new, more time precious report from the booth.
Greg Lucas apparently couldn’t hear or get the gist of JD’s attempts and just kept on talking. The situation simply flipped JD into comedy mode, as he stared at Lucas on the field, apparently now viewing Greg as a caricature of the man in “The Wizard of Oz” as he talked on while he was trying to control all those scary special effects from a position of hiding in the Great Hall of the Emerald City.
“PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!” JD almost shouted as he bellowed out that classic line from “The Wizard of Oz” and broke away from Greg Lucas for whatever that urgent news happened to have been long ago.
Now that we have to say goodbye to Jim Deshaies in Houston, I too am reminded of the farewell scene in “The Wizard of Oz” for a paraphrased goodbye: “Jim, of all the people who are now leaving the Astros, for a lot of us, I think we are going to miss you most of all.”
Good luck in the Land of the Bill Goat Curse too, JD. Someday you will have to come back and explain how leaving a club that probably won’t win for one that definitely will not win is an upgrade. ????
The Pecan Park Eagle 
December 4, 2012 at 12:39 pm |
Who could blame Jim for leaving a sinking ship.
December 4, 2012 at 4:54 pm |
Best wishes to JD. I think Cubs fans will learn to treasure his unique talents.
December 4, 2012 at 7:01 pm |
Yup, A #1 class act
December 5, 2012 at 6:26 am |
The year was 1998, a very good year for the Houston Astros, and maybe the best team we’ve ever had on a baseball field. We were playing the Cincinnati Reds. On that particular day, in the late innings, the Reds manager inserted a rookie named Mike Frank into the outfield, where he joined fellow outfielders Chris Stynes and Dmitri Young. Never missing a beat, the inestimable Mr. Deshaies dryly noted for the listeners at home that the Reds were playing their Young – Frank – and Stynes outfield.
Then there was his rewrite and recitation of the “Night Before Christmas” at one of our SABR meetings.
Had Jim Deshaies never performed superbly on the baseball field, and had he never given us a single season of his supremely competent and enjoyable commentaries from the broadcast booth, those two moments alone forever enshrined Mr. Deshaies in my heart as one of our Houston treasures. I cannot tell you how much it pains me that he is leaving.
December 7, 2012 at 8:52 pm |
I will really miss JD. He and Brownie made a wonderful team – 2nd only to Hawk and Stoney. JD would have been nuts not to make this move. He needs a national stage for his talents. He was going nowhere fast here.