It's quiet, slow-moving, and unpretentious--all of which really make this real-life story feel authentic.
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Jim Morris only pitched two years in the majors as a reliever with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, accumulating a 5.79 earned run average in 1999 and a 4.35 ERA the following year. Those are okay numbers at best, especially if you consider his total innings pitched during that brief career was just 15. So why is he a real-life hero who's inspired a Disney film?
Because "The Rookie" was an "old man"--35 years, to be exact--when he finally walked to the mound in a major league game and threw at a batter. And he got there because of a deal he made not with the Devil, like some old bluesman at the crossroads, but with the Reagan County High School baseball team in Big Lake, Texas.
Morris, a chemistry teacher and baseball coach who thought that his big chance had passed him by, was drafted by the Milwaukee Brewers in 1983 and subsequently picked up and released by the Chicago White Sox. He never made it because of arm problems. But life can be funny, and dreams have a way of reoccurring just when you least expect them to.
As we see in this film, when Morris tried to inspire his players to dream big instead of just going through the motions and letting life deal them whatever hand it felt like, they got the message. But his players added a condition. If they dreamed big and won their district championship, then he would have to try out for a major league ball club. They had seen him throw in batting practice and they had heard about his attempt to break in, so it seemed like a fair deal.
Well, like "Hoosiers" or any sports story that involves unlikely odds, you know from the outset that somehow the team or main character is going to beat those odds. But the appeal to these kind of films is the same as with any biography of a famous individual. We may know the accomplishments, but we don't know what went on behind the scenes. It's that part-the-curtain voyeurism and cause-behind-the-effect narrative that make stories like this so compelling to watch. You know they're going to win their district and you know he's going to get his big chance, but it's still fun to see how it all comes together.
Of course, that puts a tremendous burden on the actors to bring a lot to the table, just as it weighs on the screenwriter to deliver substantial subplots and for the director to somehow skirt the melodrama that's never very far away from stories like this. But everyone pulls it off. Relative "rookie" director John Lee Hancock, himself a Texan, makes the decision to partly make this about small towns in general and West Texas in particular. He begins with the legend of how the first oil well was discovered in the area and what two nuns had to do with it, he allows the camera to leisurely travel across the landscape in order to make it another character, and he lingers over the locals, whether it's old-timers playing dominoes or the owner of a dry goods store taking his time with young Jimmy Morris, a Navy brat who had moved 14 times by the age of 12. Where his stern and never-approving father ended up as a recruiter was where Jimmy could finally call home, and Hancock takes great pains to show that.
Be warned, though, the while Hancock captures the feel of a small West Texas town, he also captures the pace. "The Rookie" is a slow-moving film that invites you to just relax and experience the real life of real people in what seems darned close to real time. But I think that this approach is partly responsible for why this film doesn't just feel like another formulaic Hollywood Cinderella story. It's Hancock's matter-of-factness that goes a long way to combating the clichéd storyline and focusing our attention on quiet realities. Case in point? The day that Morris is supposed to fulfill the promise he made to his players and attend an open-camp try-out for the Devil Rays, he's on kid duty and has to pack up the three of them and drive almost a hundred miles just to get there. And he's the only would-be rookie who shows up with a stroller and has to change a diaper on his tailgate before jogging out to the mound for his big chance. Hancock could have played it up, and so, for that matter, could Dennis Quaid, who does a fine job as Morris. But they kept it real, and that's the film's chief strength.
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