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correction

The subject of a photo on Page D3 of the April 26 Sports section was incorrectly identified as Tampa Bay pitcher Jim Morris. The photo was of Miami baseball coach Jim Morris. (Published 04/27/2000)

Lorri Morris began to cry the moment she saw her husband standing there in his big league uniform that evening last September. She and the three kids had made the 3 1/2-hour drive from San Angelo, Tex., to Arlington, arriving at the ballpark just as the Texas Rangers and Tampa Bay Devil Rays were finishing their warmups.

Jim Morris, called up from the minors earlier in the day, had already taken his place in the Tampa Bay bullpen when his family showed up. His son, Hunter, camped by the dugout hoping for a glimpse of his dad, while Lorri and the two girls made their way around the ballpark to see if he was with the other relievers.

As they peeked over into the bullpen, they saw him for the first time in three months. He was 25 pounds lighter than he'd been, he was smiling and he was a few hours from becoming baseball's oldest rookie pitcher in 39 years--a 35-year-old left-handed reliever who returned to baseball last summer after a 10-year retirement.

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"It was just hard to believe," Lorri Morris said yesterday from her office at Angelo State University. "I cried. He cried. It's just unbelievable."

Four months earlier, he'd been a science teacher and high school coach making the 140-mile round-trip drive from San Angelo to Big Lake (Pop. 3,672), learning the lonesome landscape that inspired the songs of James McMurtry and the politics of Lyndon Johnson.

His dream then was to land a high school coaching job in Fort Worth that would allow him more time with his family. And then one day, he challenged his team in Big Lake by saying: "What's it going to take to motivate you guys?"

Actually, Morris doesn't remember exactly what he said. What he remembers now is that as he was challenging his kids, he was himself being challenged.

"They'd been knocked out of the basketball playoffs on a fluke, and they were down in the dumps about the baseball season," Morris said last week as he relaxed in the clubhouse before the Devil Rays played the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards. "I kept trying to motivate them. Basically, they threw it on me. They said they could tell by the way I coach and look at the game and how I feel that I still want to play. One of them said something like, 'You tell us to do one thing, but you're not willing to do it yourself.' "

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At that point, Morris made his players a promise that's now a Disney movie project.

"I just told them that if they made the playoffs, I'd go to a big league tryout camp," he said.

David Werst, owner of the local newspaper, the Big Lake Wildcat, and father of first baseman Joe David Werst, recalled: "He was telling them the usual stuff that coaches tell kids. 'You guys are good, you can be good, keep a positive attitude,' all those things. They said, 'What about you?' It might have been Joe David who said it first, but several others picked up on it. I mean, they knew he was throwing hard, but they didn't know it was that hard. It's just fantastic the way it has turned out."

The Fighting Owls did make the playoffs, and a few weeks later, Jim Morris fulfilled his end of the deal by loading the three kids into a dusty Cutlass and driving to his home town of Brownwood to participate in a Devil Rays tryout camp.

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Veteran scout Doug Gassaway, who had made the 2 1/2-hour drive from his home near Lake Whitney that morning, recalls that about 70 kids showed up.

"Typical tryout camp," he said. "None of them could play."

Morris, soft-spoken, polite and wearing a softball uniform, was the last guy to approach him. He walked up with a beer gut and an 8-year-old trailing behind him, a 5-year-old hanging on one leg and a 1-year-old in a stroller.

Gassaway asked which one wanted the tryout.

"Me," Morris said, smiling.

Gassaway rolled his eyes and said: "C'mon, Jimmy, I'm hot and I'm tired. Let's get this over with so I can go home."

Morris originally had planned to attend a tryout camp in Dallas because several teams would be there. He decided on Brownwood because he had to keep the kids while Lorri worked and because "there were fewer people to embarrass myself in front of. I figured all I was doing was fulfilling my promise to my high school kids. After that, I could go and get another job in teaching and get back on with my life."

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Morris took the mound and threw a 94 mph fastball.

Gassaway saw the reading on his radar gun and said to his assistant: "Something's wrong. Must be some electrical interference."

The assistant shook his head. He had also clocked the pitch at 94 mph.

Here's what happened next: 35-year-old Jim Morris threw 12 consecutive 98 mph fastballs.

Gassaway was speechless.

"This is crazy," the scout said, "but I'm going to call my office and see what they say. I'll let you know one way or the other."

When Morris returned home that evening, Lorri asked: "What are these messages from Doug Gassaway?"

Gassaway had telephoned Devil Rays General Manager Chuck LaMar to tell him he'd found a left-handed pitcher who threw 98 mph.

"Sign him," LaMar said.

"Chuck, he's 35 years old," Gassaway said.

Gassaway told LaMar the whole story: As a high school football star for legendary Brownwood High Coach Gordon Wood, Morris had turned down football scholarships to Penn State and Notre Dame because he wouldn't be allowed to play baseball. Instead, he went to Angelo State on an academic scholarship and was drafted by the Milwaukee Brewers in 1981. In six seasons, he never made it higher than Class A, and retired after having surgery on both his elbow and shoulder. He had returned to Texas, gotten his teaching degree, gotten married and now was the father of three. Yet even as he looked for a simpler life, he could not shake what Texan Robert Earl Keen described as "this crazy cowboy dream."

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Two days later, Gassaway had Morris back on the same mound. In a steady rain, Morris was clocked at around 96 mph--at least 5 mph faster than he'd ever thrown before retirement. Two days later, he said goodbye to his wife and kids and headed for Florida and a job that would pay him $1,200 a month. In simpler terms, he would be making $1,000 a month less than he'd made as a teacher (this season, he's making the major league minimum of $200,000, but Lorri has kept her job at Angelo State).

"I honestly don't know how Lorri made it," Morris recalled, his voice choking. "I'm here now because of her. I know God had a plan for me that was different than my own plan. I was really homesick, and we were struggling financially. When it seemed like we couldn't go on, something would happen. One time, it was a contract with a [baseball] glove company. I had them send the check to her. Little things like that would happen to me."

Lorri, who works in the admissions department at Angelo State, wondered what was happening to her life. She'd hoped that Jim would land the Fort Worth job and that the family finally could settle into a normal routine. Instead, her husband was leaving to pursue a dream that seemed beyond impossible.

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"It was a stressful summer," she said. "This wasn't in the plans. I mean, this kind of thing doesn't happen. But I knew that in his heart, he still wondered, 'What if?' As time went on, I knew the desire was still there. I didn't discourage him, but I didn't encourage him, either. I just didn't want him to get hurt. I didn't want him to go down that road again. I prayed about it, and when he first left, I cried and cried and cried. This was just beyond anything I could have ever dreamed of. It was stepping out in faith. It was totally crazy, but I figured there had to be a reason for this."

The Devil Rays pushed him through an abbreviated spring training-type program, and after he appeared in three games for Class A Orlando, he was promoted to AAA Durham.

"One day our scouting director, Dan Jennings, came in my office and said, 'I've got a story you're not going to believe,' " Devil Rays Manager Larry Rothschild said. "We didn't bring him up here because he's a good story. We brought him up because he's a left-hander with a good arm. He's 36 years old--you're not going to take your time with him."

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In 18 games at Durham--yes, the team of Crash Davis and Nuke Laloosh--Morris was 3-1 with a 5.48 ERA and 16 strikeouts in 23 innings. Then came the word that the Devil Rays were bringing him up for a September look-see.

He arrived in Arlington on the afternoon of Sept. 18, and a few hours later--and 18 years after the Milwaukee Brewers had first drafted him--Jim Morris made his big league debut by striking out Rangers shortstop Royce Clayton on four pitches that were clocked at 95 mph or better. After the game, Jim, Lorri and the kids celebrated with pizza in his hotel room.

"We heard about him a month or so before he got called up," Devil Rays catcher John Flaherty said. "I remember the guy Sports Illustrated made up--Syd Finch. He was supposed to throw 105 mph, and Jim's story sounded an awful lot like that. I really didn't believe it until that night in Texas when he came out of the bullpen."

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Morris appeared in five games last September and was impressive enough to win an invitation to this spring's big league camp. Now 36, he made the Devil Rays this spring as a left-handed specialist, and in nine games, has pitched six innings, allowed three runs, walked four and struck out six.

His velocity has declined a bit since last summer, but he has a nice slider and a decent curveball. He struggles with his composure at times, but that's not surprising considering everything that has happened.

"He's the best guy in the world," Flaherty said. "You see kids come up now and think they should have everything handed to him. This is a guy who hasn't had anything handed to him. He appreciates every day he's here. He's trying so hard to learn. He's had some success and he's had some failure, but he's handled it all in a first-class manner."

For his part, Morris still struggles with the meaning of it all.

"I wake up some mornings, and it hits me that I'm 36 years old and getting to do what I wanted to do when I was 5," he said. "It's an amazing feeling. This wasn't supposed to happen for me. God gave this to me. I don't know what the final lesson is going to be. I've gotten so many letters and phone calls from people that tell me how I've inspired them. I talked to the front office of a major league soccer team over the winter, and a lady came up and asked me to write a note to her mom, who wanted to go back to college but didn't think she could do it. I got a note a few weeks later that she was back in college. Something like that makes you feel there's a reason this is happening to me."

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