LIVING THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

“What about your dreams?”

As with many people creeping toward the middle of a responsibility-thick life with no U-turns in sight, it was a question Jim Morris couldn’t bear to ask, with an answer he could no longer imagine.

Then one dusty, dripping-hot, glorious day in desolate West Texas last spring, some kids asked it for him.

Morris, 35, a high school physics/chemistry teacher and coach, gathered his Reagan County High baseball team together to convince them they could make the playoffs for the first time in several years.

“Go for your dreams, go past your dreams,” he was telling them. “Set your goals and . . .”

“Wait a minute,” interrupted a couple of his players, almost in unison. “What about your dreams?”

They asked, because they knew. Morris never said it, but he showed it by the way he pitched daily batting practice, so hard that only a few of them would bat against him, and the catcher was afraid to catch him.

“He would stand out on the mound, and look in at us, and throw that heat against the backstop, and we knew he wanted to be in the major leagues,” student Joaquin Campos said. “You could see it in his eyes.”

So they presented Jim Morris with a childish, brilliant dare. Worried that he would be setting a bad example if he refused, he took it,

“Fine,” he told his team on that spring day. “You make the playoffs, I’ll try out for the major leagues.”

So it happened that last June, shortly after his team had qualified for the playoffs, Jim Morris found himself sitting in his dusty Olds Cutlass outside a Tampa Bay Devil Rays tryout session in Brownwood, Texas.

He was so uncomfortable, he couldn’t bring himself to get out of the car.

He was so unprepared, he was wearing softball pants.

While other players walked to the field with their duffel bags, he was pushing one of his three small children in a stroller.

While the Devil Ray scouts felt obligated to at least act interested upon registering the 70 hopeful players, they openly laughed when they saw Morris.

“They asked me if I had brought some kids to tryout,” he said. “I said, ‘Uh, no, it’s just me.”

When he told them his story--a former minor-leaguer who had not played in 12 years and was just paying up a silly bet with his high school team--scouts placed him at the bottom of

the schedule.

For two hours he waited, and watched, and almost went back home, but didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t.

“I had a made a promise,” Morris said.

This, then, is a story about what happens when you keep such promises, especially the ones made to yourself, quietly, and long ago.

Jim Morris discovered that day that those hard pitches he was throwing in high school batting practice were 98 mph.

A month later, he was throwing 98 mph in the minor leagues.

Saturday, on a big-league mound in Arlington, Texas, completing the most charmed story in baseball in many years, he was throwing 98 mph for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays against the Texas Rangers.

Don’t ask how. Don’t ask why.

Just watch and enjoy, which is what Morris’ wife did before the game, running down to the bullpen to see him in a real big-league uniform, bursting into tears at the sight.

Just go tell somebody about it, which is what Campos did when he became the first student to hear the news among the 3,800 residents of Big Lake, Texas.

He was called by Morris’ wife at midnight. He spent the next day driving his brown pickup truck up and down Main Street, past Shot’s Convenience Store, past the Tres Amigos Exxon, stopping people on the street and yelling out his window.

“Coach made it! He made it!” he shouted to his small world.

Good news for them. Good news for us all.

A Road Less Traveled

Jim Morris was easy to spot when he walked into the Edison Field visiting clubhouse Monday with teammate Jose Canseco to prepare for the Devil Rays’ three-game series with the Angels.

While Canseco headed directly for his locker and began undressing, Morris stopped and stared.

When Morris conducted this interview, he remained standing, and staring, and fully clothed.

His temples and mustache are graying. His jeans and golf shirt are plain. His dazed smile seems genuine.

To meet the oldest player in nearly 30 years to make his big-league debut is to understand that he could easily be you, or I, or your neighbor who pitches to his son in the Pinto League.

Jim Morris pitched Saturday in Texas in the first major-league game Jim Morris had seen in three years.

He pitched again Monday, throwing a perfect eighth inning, retiring Jim Edmonds, Mo Vaughn and Tim Salmon in the Angels’ 10-5 victory.

“This is still amazing,” he said. “This is still unbelievable. I’m not sure I’m comprehending any of it.”

Somebody recently asked him what sort of odds he would have placed on making the major leagues.

He politely explained that it wasn’t a matter of odds.

“Chance? I had no chance,” he said. “None at all. I was going to try out and go home.”

It was easy to understand why.

He had been there, done that, and been burned.

“Nothing ever went right for Jimmy in his baseball career,” wife Lorrie said. “Nothing ever worked out, and sometimes I wonder if he ever really got over it.”

He was once a good enough pitcher to be drafted by Milwaukee in the first round of the now-defunct winter draft in 1983.

But even then, the left-hander was throwing “only” 87 mph.

One of the most amazing things about this amazing story is that how that speed increased over the past 10 years with . . . what?

Said Morris: “I have no idea. Maybe it is just God saying it’s my time.”

Said Tampa Bay Manager Larry Rothschild: “The way I figure, his increase in velocity is due to one of three things. Either it was a surgery, or something from his chemistry class, or throwing all that batting practice to those kids.”

Even though he didn’t throw as hard, he did quick damage to his elbow and shoulder after being drafted, and his first career lasted only three full seasons.

When surgeries finally sidelined him after the 1987 season at age 23, he wanted to get as far away as possible.

“He couldn’t even watch a major-league game, because somebody he once played with would be playing, and it would kill him,” Lorrie said. “I really felt for him.”

But life went on, and he received his education, and took out his athletic frustration as a punter at Division II Angelo State (Texas), and then became a teacher.

“Finally, we had reached a point where our careers had started, and he was happy, and had gotten past all the ideas of playing baseball,” Lorrie said. “He was now passing along that knowledge to somebody younger. Everything had worked out.”

And then came that silly bet.

The only reason he tried out for the Devil Rays is that he heard their tryout being advertised on the radio one day when he was driving to his father’s home in Brownwood.

Because his wife worked that day in the admissions office at Angelo State, he had to bring the children to the tryout with him.

And because he was considered such a joke by the Devil Rays, the scouts brought in a second radar gun after the first one registered a 96-mph reading.

He threw 12 consecutive pitches at 98 mph that day, but still they didn’t believe, so he was summoned back a couple of days later to see if the arm had fallen off.

In the pouring rain, he threw that hard again, and the Devil Ray scouts were believers, even if they were afraid to recommend that their bosses sign somebody older than they were.

“As amazing as this is for everyone else, it’s more amazing to those who live it every day,” Rothschild said.

Morris had decent success in the minor leagues, striking out 22 in 28 innings with a 4.82 earned-run average, as good as could be expected considering he had been thrust into a world of guys 10 years younger.

“Nobody asked me to go out after games with them, because I think they sort of knew,” Morris said. “I would just go home every night and watch TV.”

Then, before he knew it, he was on that TV, walking to the mound Saturday to face Royce Clayton in the eighth inning with two out and a runner on first and in an eventual 6-1 loss.

He had just arrived in town that day, and had barely met any of his teammates, but already they didn’t believe him.

“We heard the stories and it just seemed too crazy,” catcher John Flaherty said. “A high school teacher throwing 95 miles-an-hour? It sounded like something somebody made up, like that Sidd Finch guy.”

Before the game, when his wife was trying to get his attention in the bullpen, teammates ignored her.

“They thought I was just somebody trying to get a ball,” Lorrie said. “They later apologized.”

All she wanted to do was hug her husband and tell her how proud she was.

He touched his eyes and realized she wasn’t the only one crying.

“To see him in that uniform, in that place, it was the end of a fairy tale,” Lorrie said.

Or maybe the beginning.

Flaherty was waiting for Morris when he took the mound in the eighth.

“Larry said, ‘We’re going to have to calm this guy down,’ ” Flaherty recalled.

He was right.

“I stepped out of the bullpen and looked around at all the people and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m in the big leagues,’ ” Morris said. “But then I got to the mound, and everything got smaller, and finally I was OK.”

At the very least. He struck out Clayton on four hard pitches.

“I didn’t throw anything against the backstop, so that was good,” he said.

He was taken out of the game, and later celebrated with his wife and children back at the fancy big hotel ordering pizza and falling asleep, dreaming the best dreams, his dreams.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com