Sports Publications

The world series is worth the wait

Sporting News, The, Nov 5, 2001 by Dave Kindred

They were 17 years old, and one thing led to another, and they had a baby boy they named Mike. They dropped out of school. They got in the car, and they drove out of California across mountains and desert to Las Vegas.

They carried the boy in a five-gallon bucket and made him comfortable by surrounding him with sponges. A laugh here: "The first `car seat,'" Mike Morgan says.

Mike Morgan is baseball's human atlas. In his crinkly, smiling face is a map of the game. The Diamondbacks' relief pitcher has worked in four U.S. time zones, in Canada, on both coasts, from top to bottom, in the heartland, in the desert. He has worked for 22 professional teams, 12 in the major leagues; no other athlete in any sport has played for as many major league teams. Another laugh: "Have arm, will travel."

Such an arm it is, all but impervious to the erosion of muscle and tendon that comes to most human body parts. At age 42, Morgan is in his 21st big-league season. He's the only active player left over from the 1978 season; he's only the ninth pitcher to work in four decades, and he's only the fifth pitcher with more saves after age 40 than before. "This thing is rubber," he says, raising his right arm. "I'll pitch 'til I'm 50--the white Satchel Paige."

A starting pitcher until the last two seasons, Morgan has been so good for so long that he has lost a lot of games for middling teams. Seven seasons he won 10 games or more; 11 times he lost in double figures.

At 140-185, he leads active pitchers in defeats. He's now a set-up man, an eighth-inning specialist getting the game to the closer.

And now, a World Series. His first. "The only other time I played for a championship was 1981, in Double-A ball, in Nashville. We lost to Orlando and Frank Viola, 2-0. I got clipped with another of my `L' shutouts. But I tell you, this is different, this World Series. Back in Nashville, we didn't have all this media. I think we had one photographer, and he went to 7-Eleven and bought a disposable Kodak. This is the big time here."

His voice was a boy's, giddy, words piling on each other as he remembered his World Series debut, the eighth inning of Game 1: "Man, I was ready, 10 pitches, ready, and the umpire tells me, `Two more minutes, throw some more, and I'm going, `Throw more? I'm ready. I'm saving these bullets for the guys with bats in their hands," Morgan said.

"It hit me when I looked up in the stands to see my family. I've never done that, ever. I'm thinking, `What am I doing, looking up in the stands?' I looked for my wife of 21 years, our two kids, my niece, my nephew, my mom. Her name's Nellie, she's a little thing, barely 4 feet tall, 80 pounds. I thought I saw her with tears in her eyes."

Facing the three-time defending world-champion Yankees--he worked for them in 1982--Morgan pitched a perfect inning: "A little splitter, a little hammer, a slider in, a heater out. Three quick outs. It was a rush."

When the 17-year-olds, Henry and Nellie, made their home in Las Vegas all those years ago, Henry Morgan went to work setting tile. In time he took the boy Mike with him, teaching him the trade, how to work the grout and tile, $4 an hour. Mostly, though, the father wanted the son to play all the games.

God Bless America is beautiful, as all the flags are beautiful, and in the weeks since September 11 they have been a balm and a blessing, make no mistake. But in an October, even this October, or maybe especially this October, few things speak more clearly of our national character than a plain, simple, glorious baseball game.

The Morgans started early.

"From 6 years old, Henry's boy was good," Henry's boy Mike said. A great day came a week after high school graduation when Mike Morgan, 18, made his major league debut with the Athletics. The 17,157 spectators included the man he calls Pops.

Last November, out of telephone reach on a hunting trip in the backcountry of Utah, Morgan saw his wife, Kassie, driving through snowdrifts. She'd come to tell him about Pops' heart attack. Before and after surgery, Morgan held his father's hand. Eight days later, Henry Morgan died. He was buried wearing his boy Mike's Diamondbacks jersey.

When the Diamondbacks won the NLCS, they returned to Phoenix at 3 in the morning. Even at that hour, Mike Morgan began driving north. He would go to the cemetery to tell Pops. But an hour out, exhausted, Morgan called his brother in Las Vegas: "I asked Larry to go out and give a knuckle to Pops' grave."

Now Morgan stood at his locker and said it was wonderful that his mother, his wife, his children had seen him, after all these years, in a World Series. "But Pops had the best seat of all," he said, "a reserved seat in heaven watching his boy play ball."