(2002) From Mike Rich's screenplay, based on actual events, this Disney feature, directed by John Lee Howard, dramatizes how the oldest rookie to Major League Baseball in thirty years, Jimmy Morris at 35 (an age by which most professional players are in retirement) in 1999, became a left-handed relief pitcher for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

After spending most of the summer pitching for a AA minor-league team in Orlando, Florida, and then for the AAA Durham Bulls in North Carolina (remember Bull Durham?), Morris, wearing number 63, made his big-league debut on September 18th, 1999, in Arlington, Texas, against the home team Texas Rangers (the team with whom George W. Bush was once affiliated as an owner) by striking out Royce Clayton on three consecutive 90-plus mile-an-hour fastballs to end the inning in a 6-1 loss (though the film has the score 8-1 when Morris takes the mound).

Morris appeared in only 21 games for Tampa Bay over two partial seasons (an injury and surgery once again curtailed his career in 2000 as had happened fifteen years earlier), all in short relief, hurling a total of 15 innings, striking out 13 of the 69 batters he faced, recording a mediocre earned-run average of 4.80; he neither won nor lost any games, finishing six without any saves.

As the son a US Navy career man, Jimmy and his family moved frequently. His love of playing baseball, though, was crushed when his father was assigned as a recruiter to Big Lake, Texas, where the town had no baseball program for youths.

Here in 1923 two nuns invested their life savings in an oil well and prayed to Saint Rita, the patron saint of impossible dreams, for a strike. When the discovery well produced black gold, the oilmen played baseball in their spare time on a field where Jim would later become the high-school coach of a lowly baseball team, the Big Lake Owls (actual name, the Reagan County Owls).

As a science teacher with a wife, Lorri (Rachel Griffiths), and three children, Jim, needing a better salary, applies to various school districts. On a whim after practice he throws a few pitches to the team's catcher and later throws batting practice, startling his players with the velocity and accuracy of his pitching ability.

After Coach Morris lectures the boys about their "quitting on me and quitting on themselves" while encouraging them to want more in life by having dreams of becoming more than they are, Joel, the catcher, proposes a bargain: "We start winning, you try out again" for a another shot at pitching as a professional in the big leagues. Jim accepts the challenge; the team begins a winning streak that takes them to the state tournament. The boys then chant: "Now it's your turn, coach."

At the same time he makes an impression in the tryouts, an offer from a school in Fort Worth to teach science and coach baseball arrives that would double his salary. In the minor leagues he'd get paid only $600 a month with scant chance of getting called up to the parent club.

In this controversial era of performance-enhancing drugs - with slugger Barry Bonds and pitching ace Roger Clemens, among others, suspected of using steroids and/or HGH to extend their careers - is there any reason to wonder if Jim Morris's pitching ability might have improved dramatically with pharmaceuticals? As a twenty-year-old prospect with the Milwaukee Brewers, his fastball's top speed was 85 to 86 miles per hour. Fifteen years later he's flame throwing close to 100 mph, a feat matched by only a handful of pitchers. As a chemistry teacher, very likely he knew about the modern chemistry already popular with some athletes. So was it another miracle from Saint Rita, or might steroids have been the miracle?

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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