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Warren Morris has drawn rave reviews - many of them from a man called Maz - in his rookie season with the Pirates Sunday, September 19, 1999 Chuck Finder, Post-Gazette Sports Writer
Baseball's gods brought them together for a proper introduction some three years after their fates became intertwined, the two second basemen famed for their stirring places in home-run history. The little fellow from Cajun country was traded to Pittsburgh in July 1998 amid what now seems a deal slightly less lopsided than the original Louisiana Purchase. The homegrown Pirates legend was brought to Bradenton for a spring-training fortnight in February, a special tutor asked to relate the expertise that made him the modern day's finest-fielding second baseman, statistically speaking.
Starting in Florida, they formed a bond because of their similar demeanors, their similar storybook lives.
Warren Morris and Bill Mazeroski.
Little Mo and Maz.
"I think he's going to be a hell of a player," Mazeroski said the other day. "Be around awhile. And I hope it's all with Pittsburgh.
"He'll probably just about break every record I had there."
That's heady stuff from a man with Hall of Fame credentials: 2,163 games (fifth in Pirates history), 2,016 hits (eighth), 136 home runs (seventh), 853 RBIs (sixth), seven All-Star appearances (third), 161 double plays in a season (major-league record, 1966) and 1,706 double plays in a career (major-league record for non-first basemen).
He spent 17 seasons at Pirates second base, defining the position, earning a special place in a pastime that so embraces its past. Rightly or wrongly, he is forever remembered for that two-out, ninth-inning, 1960 World Series-winning home run just as much as his spring-training student is for his two-out, ninth-inning, 1996 College World Series-winning home run -- the only times in those events' collective 149 years they ended that amazing way. Yet Maz the teacher predicts his Pirates exploits may well be surpassed by Little Mo the student, born two years after the former retired but fashioned from the same stuff.
Warren Randall Morris has 14 home runs, 69 RBIs, a .295 average, 127 starts, 13 errors and a serious chance to become the Pirates' inaugural National League Rookie of the Year.
William Stanley Mazeroski, the same as Pirates second baseman Johnny Ray (all 162 games in 1982) and catcher Jason Kendall (1996) later, never won that award when he was a rookie, when he was a 20-year-old kid from Wheeling, W. Va., batting .243 and committing eight errors in 81 starts in 1956.
"I think he's going to hit about 20, 25 home runs, drive in 80," Mazeroski continued, peering into Morris' future. "When I first saw him, I liked him a lot. [Managing general partner Kevin] McClatchy and Cam [Bonifay the general manager], both at different times in the spring, I told them I thought he'd start for them.
"You can put him out there and forget about him. Those are the kinds of guys you like to have. Anybody can manage those guys. They just do the job."
That was Maz.
That is Little Mo.
* Statistics through Sept. 16.
The little guy always overcame.
From academic scholar to baseball walk-on with the acclaimed Louisiana State University program. From the weight room to a starting role as a redshirt freshman. From a converted second baseman to the competent replacement of an All-American, first-round draftee and local legend named Todd Walker (now of the Minnesota Twins). From debilitating injury to College World Series and Olympics star. From a Class AA prospect buried under the veteran-laden Texas Rangers to a non-roster player in Pirates spring training to a legit Rookie of the Year candidate.
"Warren Morris," began Smoke Laval, a former LSU assistant and the current Northeast Louisiana coach, not to mention a South Fayette High grad, "will do well no matter what environment you put him in. He'd fit in with truck drivers, the Globetrotters or riding Shamu at Sea World."
Nothing with Morris should surprise.
Even his arrival into the world 25 3/4 years ago was an upset.
"The doctor told me I couldn't have anymore children," said Barbara Morris, who had given birth to Wally three days shy of a full 17 years earlier. "Then Warren came along. It was really a blessing."
A religious family from Alexandria in the middle of Louisiana, the Morrises centered their lives on church, athletics and schooling. Bill, the father, was a longtime high school teacher and basketball coach retired to work for the state lining up education benefits for migrant workers' children. Barbara, the mother, worked at Louisiana College and later the Louisiana Baptist Convention. Wally played basketball well enough to earn a junior-college grant.
The youngest Morris played with older neighborhood kids: basketball in the driveway, Nerf football in the street and something they called tape-ball -- a wad of duct tape batted around by a similarly affixed Whiffle bat. He followed his father the coach to basketball practices, where the assistant coach was dazzled by the kid's intensity. As Dan Boniol put it: "Warren's got such a mental mind."
Being a savvy, 5-foot-9, 150-pound, all-district guard was nice and all, but he knew basketball wasn't his future. Baseball didn't seem to be, either.
"Warren had a hard time hitting the ball out of the infield," said Boniol, later the baseball coach at crosstown Alexandria High.
He was working the LSU coach's camp the summer of 1991 when he advised Skip Bertman to take a look at a scrappy, tough-out of a shortstop up north in Alexandria. The coach, without ever seeing him play, invited Morris to walk on.
Oh, Northwestern (La.) State wanted him to play baseball. Other schools from New Orleans to Mississippi State became increasingly interested when they discovered he already qualified for an academic scholarship, making him an athletic freebie. He was the senior-class valedictorian with a perfect 4.0 grade-point average, student-body president, District Literary Rally winner, "Most Likely to Succeed," "Most Dependable" and the prestigious "Big Chief Cumtux" winner at Bolton.
As competitive in the classroom as on the playing field, Morris couldn't resist the chance to join a major-college program.
"Going into LSU," he said, "I was just hoping to play at some point.
"I never dreamed about what was to follow."
"I mean," Laval recalled, "he looked like Howdy Doody."
The first team meeting at LSU, Morris glanced around the room and noticed that the only guy skinnier was the equipment manager. And everybody called that guy "Baby Bones."
Tigers teammates called the newcomer "Mercury" Morris, after the Miami Dolphins running back from Avonworth. Tigers coaches called him Project. Laval worked with him in the field, the strength coach in the weight room, and hitting coach Beetle Bailey -- we aren't making this up -- in batting practice. By the start of his redshirt freshman year the next fall, he was swinging for the fences and unrecognized by teammates. "Who's that?" asked Brad Wilson, a walk-on from Fox Chapel High.
"Warren was probably third team that fall," Laval said of thezoology major and medical-school hopeful. "Good grades, never a problem. . . we said, 'Let's keep him on.' That spring, you never could get him out of the lineup."
The regular left fielder/designated hitter a year later replaced Walker at second base. The year after that, 1996, the steady second baseman was a U.S. Olympic team starter and a redshirt junior with a really painful right wrist.
Morris sat out one month and then another of what was his senior year academically and likely his final year athletically. Doctors were confounded, because he twice aborted comebacks due to pain. He worried that his career was over. "I said, 'If it was meant to be, it was meant to be. If not, I could do something else.' "
A doctor ordered a special bone scan as a last resort, and a broken hamate bone was discovered. Surgery meant five to seven weeks away from baseball. Twenty-eight days later, Morris was back in the Tigers' lineup, ignominious as it was: He made the first two outs of a 17-run inning in the NCAA regionals against Georgia Tech.
The surgically repaired wrist scratched him from batting practice until the day before the 1996 College World Series championship game in Omaha, Neb.
Two doubles, a throw-out at home plate and an 8-7 deficit set the stage for that mighty Morris ninth inning.
Fox Chapel's Wilson stood at third base after his leadoff double was followed by Justin Bowles' advancing groundout and Tim Lanier's strikeout. It was such a nerve-wracking moment, with two outs and a title dream and national television and whatnot, that Wilson still admits, "I couldn't even spit." Up to the plate strode the No. 9 hitter in the order, the second baseman with the creaky wrist and zero homers in 27 games that season, not to mention 12 in his entire life (excluding tape-ball).
Back home in Alexandria, saving her vacation days for the two Olympic weeks in Atlanta, his mother walked away from the TV when Miami owned a 7-4 lead and wrote off the game as a loss. "When he came up in the ninth, I said, 'Oh, no, poor Warren. Not for him to make the last out.' "
Morris expected a first-pitch curveball from All-American Miami reliever Robbie Morrison, and that was what he hit into the right-field third row at Rosenblatt Stadium. Although, he maintains today, "I was just as shocked as anybody it went out."
The magical moment so captured baseball and a four-seam nation, workers in airports asked for him by name and clerks at fast-food restaurants gave him free food (his usual value meal, of course). Little Warren Morris rode in five parades, became LSU's homecoming king and won the state's male athlete of the year plus an ESPY. No less an LSU icon than former Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon proclaimed it the single-most compelling moment in school history, if not state history.
"People in Louisiana say it doesn't matter what he wants the rest of his life, Warren'll get it in Louisiana," said Dennis Breland, his Bolton High baseball coach. Wilson, marrying an Alexandria woman next month, added the hometown folks are almost ready to erect a statue for the 5-11, 185-pound guy who casts a long shadow.
"It's amazing how many people were watching," Morris said. "It's still neat."
"Even at 22, that turns your head," Mazeroski said of that nationally recognized homer, such as the one he hit at age 24. "But after my home run, I still had 13 more years to play.
"Yeah, we've talked about it. You can't live off one hit. You've got to keep going, keep proving yourself over and over."
There was professional baseball life after The Homer, but not much. In 1997, his first season in the Texas organization that drafted him in the fifth round the June before, he batted a measly .219 in Class AAA Oklahoma City after a successful 12-homer, 75-RBI run at Class A Charlotte. The Rangers needed arm help for the 1998 stretch drive, and they were willing to part with the second baseman hitting .331 with 14 homers and 75 RBIs in 95 games at Class AA Tulsa. Morris and former No. 1 draftee Todd Van Poppel came to the Pirates in exchange for Esteban Loaiza on July 17.
"We thought we were getting a good, young player," Bonifay said. "The rest of it has been Warren Morris ..."
With an assist from Mazeroski.
"He was doing a lot of good things," the spring-training teacher said. "Everywhere he's been, he's hit. The only [concern] people talked about was his fielding, and I didn't see anything wrong with that."
Of Mazeroski's teachings, Morris said, "He simplified things: Use two hands, catch the ball and get rid of it quick."
As if it were that easy.
"And he gave me a lot of confidence," Morris added.
There's no question Mazeroski got it started, Bonifay said, but then the smart little man with the knack for overcoming completed the play.
By spring training's end, incumbent second baseman Tony Womack was getting traded to Arizona and Pat Meares the shortstop was getting hurt. That meant more time at shortstop for utilityman Mike Benjamin, which meant more starts at second for Morris.
Just like that first season playing for LSU: They never could get him out of the lineup.
Morris started and rapped a double on the Pirates' opening night, then the next day had to ask reporters: "Which way to the field?" He made his first error that second game, but committed a mere 10 in the ensuing 126 (before two in the past week). He went on a 36-game stretch without one. Even more defensively impressive, the rookie ranks among the top 10 in NL assists (369) ahead of such luminaries as the Reds' Barry Larkin -- the same All-Star who told Morris earlier this season how much he enjoyed watching the rookie play.
The 96 double plays that Morris helped to turn (of the team's NL-second 162), Bonifay added, "That's been an important part of our club this year."
As for offense, after his average fell to .256 after 28 games, Morris batted .300 or better in May, June, July and August. A September swoon has caused his average to dip below that coveted plateau, but he still could finish the season as the first rookie second baseman in major-league history to amass 10-plus homers and bat .285 minimum.
"He doesn't even look like this is his first year," Meares said. "It seems like he's already got five, six years in this league."
"What he's done in baseball ...," began Walker, his old LSU teammate. "Actually, getting a chance to start in college was a big deal for him. It just shows you how hard the guy works. He had the ability, but I think he pushed himself to thislevel."
The heretofore inconsistent Loaiza won six consecutive games earlier this summer and temporarily solidified an unstable Rangers rotation, yet Morris carries the bearing of a career fixture at second base. He looks that way to fans, such as Andy Offerman, the 12-year-old who rescued the missing 1979 World Championship trophy and, as his reward, asked to meet Morris -- his Pirates favorite. He looks that way to Mazeroski, himself a career fixture at second base. And he apparently looks that way to Pirates management, who just might make a long-term commitment to the rookie.
"We'll talk about it at the end of the year," Bonifay said.
Can this nice guy -- who, with wife Julie, wrote a letter-to-the-editor of his hometown Alexandria Daily Town Talk thanking the 300-400 fans who traveled four hours to Houston to see him play a month ago -- finish first in Rookie of the Year voting by the Baseball Writers of America?
"I tell you, if he doesn't win it, it'll be a shame," Meares said. He referred to Cincinnati reliever Scott Williamson, the current favorite partly because of the Reds' success, a Tulane guy who competed against Morris in college. "But, to me, it's hardly close. The grind you go through day in and day out ... There's not even a race."
"All I can do is go do my thing, and all that stuff takes care of itself," added Morris, who, way back when, wasn't even the MVP in his own hometown after his senior high school season (former Twins prospect Ben Jones was). "My main thought is to try to help the team out. I'm not into individual things.
"This season already has been much better than I ever could have hoped for. Coming in, I thought I had a chance to play here and there. To play every day and learn as much as I have ..."
Why, it's enough to make his friend and teacher Mazeroski boast.
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Making the turn