Reliving His Field Dreams

Jim Morris recalls the magical evening he made his debut as a major league pitcher--a turning point in the life of the 38-year-old lefty and one that is re-created in the new true-life baseball saga “The Rookie.”

“You have got to understand that at 12:30 that morning, I get told I am going back to my home state [Texas] after losing the triple-A playoffs,” Morris recalls of that day three years ago. “I am getting to wear a big league uniform and I get to see my family for the first time in three months and do something I have wanted since I was 5 years old. Not only that, I get to play and I strike out the first guy I faced. The day just kept getting better and better.”

The filmmakers got permission to shoot that scene at the Texas Rangers’ Arlington Stadium, where Morris first pitched in “the show.” It took place during the seventh-inning stretch of a real game last summer “We had only a minute and a half to shoot it,” recalls Dennis Quaid, who plays Morris in the film.

“We were re-creating the moment that was the culmination of his lifelong dream in the very same stadium where it happened,” Quaid says. “I have seen footage of it with him running out [of the bullpen], and when he got up to the mound, the coach was talking to him and he was just kind of shaking his head.”

“The Rookie,” which opens today, is “The Natural” filtered through a Frank Capra sensibility. (The Disney release is also one of the rare non-animated films to get a G rating). Directed by John Lee Hancock from a script by Mike Rich, (who also wrote the basketball drama “Finding Forrester”), “The Rookie” chronicles how Morris, a high school science teacher and father of three young children, got a second chance to pursue his dream of pitching in the major leagues. After being drafted by the Milwaukee Brewers in 1983, Morris played in the minors for five years until a severe shoulder and elbow injury forced him to retire.

Morris found a new career in his hometown of Big Lake, Texas, as a baseball coach and chemistry teacher at the local high school. Three years ago, the team members told their coach that if they won the division championship, he would have to try out for the majors. When the team did win, Morris pitched at a local tryout for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and astonished the scouts by pitching 98 mph fastballs. Although he was 35 at the time, the Devil Rays signed him to its minor league team and he was later brought up to the majors--the ultimate baseball fantasy trip.

Sitting next to each other recently in the metal bleachers at a baseball field in Rancho Park, Morris and Quaid seem to have little in common.

Morris is bulky with premature gray hair. Quaid is a month shy of 48--a decade older than Morris--and is slight and wiry. Morris answers most of his questions with a “yes, ma’am.” Quaid’s favorite expression appears to be “sweetie.”

But first glances are deceiving. Like Morris, Quaid grew up in Texas. They are both lefties. And they are both fans of the 1942 baseball movie “The Pride of the Yankees.” Quaid first learned about Morris while he was still in the minors. “I saw a television news magazine story on ABC back in 1999,” the actor says. “I thought it would make a great movie. I didn’t think I would play in it. I’m in my 40s. I am supposed to be retired from sports.”

Morris, who was a consultant on the film, was a constant presence on the set outside Austin. “It was an asset for me to have the real guy there,” Quaid says. “Sometimes if we would get stuck with a piece of dialogue especially in the coaching scenes with the kids, I would just go to the guy [and say,] ‘What would you do here? What would you say?’”

Quaid played a pitcher early in his film career in a baseball sequence in the 1977 film “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” but really hasn’t played the game since Little League. Although he’s played everything from boxers (“Tough Enough”) to football players (“Everybody’s All American,” “Any Given Sunday”), Quaid admits, “I was too small for sports in school. That’s why I got into drama.”

Morris and his doctors don’t know why his arm got stronger with age. In his 20s, his fastest pitch was 85 mph. “When they fixed my arm at 25, they didn’t fix it for me to pitch,” Morris says. “They fixed it for everyday life like to play golf and play with the kids I hadn’t yet had. I took seven years off throwing anything. When I got the head-coaching job, I started throwing batting practice. For some reason, my arm speed picked up. I didn’t know how hard I threw until the tryout. The kids had tried to tell me, but I didn’t believe them because by the middle of the season they were hitting them. So I had no reason to believe anything extraordinary was happening at the time.”

Quaid quips that he “probably threw like an actress” when he started to train for the movie about three months before production started last March in Texas. “That was a long process that Dennis accomplished in a short time,” Morris says. “He worked with me to break down the motion. We threw together side by side in Dodger Stadium and they filmed us so he would go back and look at it. It’s fortunate that Major League Baseball jumped on this project, so they gave him the game films of the games I had pitched in.”

Morris says that Quaid got so good that Tampa Bay sportswriters told him after they saw the movie, “‘We can’t pick this apart.’ Dennis did a great job. He just learned how to be a pitcher. If the sportswriters can’t pick it apart, I don’t think anybody can.”

The media coverage of Morris began almost as soon as he was signed to play in triple A. Producers Mark Ciardi and Gordon Gray were the first to approach Morris after reading about him in Sports Illustrated. Ciardi and Morris were roommates in the minors in 1983 and ’84.

“After he got called up to the big leagues, his agent got 250 calls from producers,” Ciardi says. “We were in the process of locking up the rights but had not gotten them yet. Luckily, we ended up securing them. I would have been despondent if we weren’t the ones doing the story.”

Having played with Morris, Ciardi says, “I know he didn’t throw like that when his arm was healthy and he was a lot younger. I still can’t explain how he did what he did--98 miles per hour and left-handed? That is pretty rare.”

“The Rookie” is a cinematic anomaly--a G-rated film that is really more for adults than kids.

“We were surprised at the G rating,” Ciardi says. “We thought about it and said, ‘Why not? This would be a good film for a family to see.’

“So we didn’t shy away from it, but people should know it is not your typical G-movie from Disney. It’s an adult movie with themes for everyone. It is about so many more things than just baseball.”

Morris, who has a cameo in the film as a minor league umpire, would often get emotional on the set watching scenes from his life play out.

He also admits crying when he saw the finished film. “I called my mom when I walked out of the screening and I said bring lots of Kleenex to New York for the premiere,” he recalls. “It is that dead on. My mom and my dad and my family know everything I went through and everything I put them through.”

Quaid, he says, captured him perfectly.

“I wear my emotions on my sleeve a lot and people can tell by looking at my face what I’m thinking,” Morris says. “I thought his facial expression in the movie said so much without saying anything. It was just easy to read what he was going through all the time.”

The actor grins broadly. “It’s called subtext,” he tells Morris.

“I’m not from Hollywood,” he tells Quaid. “I don’t know about subtext.”

Last year, Morris quit baseball. “I signed with the Dodgers in December 2000. I came out here for six weeks for spring training at Dodger Stadium and I went out to Vero Beach,” Fla., says Morris, who now lives in Dallas. “I had a little tendinitis but I could have thrown through that. But I missed my kids.”