ESPN recently asked Jim Morris whom he would like to invite to dinner and why. Morris included President Bush on his list, since he “has seen some things other presidents have not had to look at”–things such as what happened on September 11.
Were the two to dine together, I suspect that Morris would find the president less interested in talking about the war on terrorism than in querying him about his own experiences. As it happens, Morris has a story. The story doesn’t involve politics but baseball–a Bush interest, you could say. The story is incredible, seven times incredible, and it now is a terrific movie, “The Rookie.”
Jimmy Morris, a Brownwood, Texas, native, wanted to be a major league pitcher from the earliest he could remember. He was a left-hander and good enough to be drafted by the Milwaukee Brewers. But he blew out his arm in Class A. He was out of baseball by age 23.
Morris became a science teacher at Big Lake High School and the coach of its woeful baseball team. In 1999, having challenged his team to do better, the players challenged him to try out for a major league club if they won district. They had seen his fastball in batting practice and thought he still had something left.
The coach thought that they were wrong and that his age–he now was 35, old in baseball years–made the whole idea preposterous. But if all he had to do to motivate the team was agree to show up at some camp somewhere and throw a few pitches, that didn’t ask much of him, he figured. He said OK.
Amazingly, Big Lake proceeded to win district. Coach Morris, married and the father of three children, kept his end of the deal. At a Tampa Bay tryout camp, his fastball was clocked at 98 mph, a speed achieved by only a handful of pitchers and 12 mph faster than he had thrown a dozen years before. The team signed him and sent him to its Class AA team in Orlando and then to its Class AAA team in Durham.
In September 1999, the Devil Rays brought him up to the big club, which happened to be playing the Rangers (once owned by President Bush) at the Ballpark in Arlington. Morris got the call in his very first game, striking out the only batter he faced, Royce Clayton, on four pitches. Jim Morris made four more appearances that year and another 16 in 2000 before going on the disabled list: arm trouble, again, and it forced his retirement, this time for good.
You couldn’t write a more unbelievable story than Morris’s. It was destined to be a movie, and, in fact, the producer, Mark Ciardi, reading about Morris in an August 1999 issue of Sports Illustrated, envisioned a movie even then, a month before the pitcher’s arrival in the bigs. Ciardi had a special interest in the story, having recognized Jim Morris from the photo accompanying the SI piece as a teammate of his when they both were in the Brewers’ organization.
Morris served as an adviser on the movie, which looks at various relationships of his–with his father, who apparently didn’t think much of his interest in baseball; his wife, who had to shoulder the burden of raising the children during his absence; and his 8-year-old son, as in love with the game as his father. The movie emphasizes the theme of making something of yourself, of pursuing dreams.
The movie is being sold–even by Morris himself–as not about baseball but about those transcending themes, of family, dreams, and second chances. Yet the movie would fall flat without its evident love of the game. “The Rookie” has ballplaying at every level–from sandlot to high school to the minors and the bigs, and it never is too much.
The movie leaves unanswered the mystery of Morris’s arm, the kind that baseball uniquely seems to offer up: How could someone who threw 85 mph in 1987 throw 98 mph a dozen years later? Baseball history is full of flame-throwers who hurt their arms and manage to continue their careers throwing slow stuff. Morris merely reversed the pattern. Maybe the jump in mph can be explained by years of throwing batting practice, which built up his arm. Maybe.
This mystery is what makes Morris’s late-in-baseball-life jump to the major leagues almost magical. I imagine that if they ever do break bread together, the president will ask Jim Morris how in the world he got so fast.
Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard.
