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American Morning
Sports Analyst Discusses Season
Aired April 01, 2002 - 08:49 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: It is opening day of the baseball season, and that's good news for a whole bunch of people. One major league longshot, already a big hit, "The Rookie," is Hollywood's version of the Jim Morris story. We talked about it earlier when Anderson was doing the box office receipts for the weekend. Morris was a former minor league prospect who finally got to the majors in his late 30s.
Joining us with his take on the upcoming baseball season and this movie and the championship in the NCAA basketball, Keith Olbermann is here. How you doing?
KEITH OLBERMANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I'm good. How about you?
JACK: Fine. A feel-good movie was the way this "Rookie" thing was described. That makes me not want to go immediately.
OLBERMANN: Oh, feel good could mean anything.
JACK: Yes.
OLBERMANN: You feel good when it's over...
JACK: When it's over.
OLBERMANN: ... and you're outside. What I'm here for, Jack, is in case you plan to go see it,...
JACK: OK.
OLBERMANN: ... and I wanted to give a brief summary of the facts that they might be tampering with to improve the, quote, "true," unquote, story of Jim Morris. And I thought it best to do this now so that if next year, there's this big stink at Oscar's time that I was leading a smear campaign against the "The Rookie," at least you would all know that I brought this up before I knew whether or not they had stuck to the script.
First, this title character, the former Tampa Bay Devil Rays' pitcher, Jim Morris, never won 50 games in one season.
JACK: Nobody did.
OLBERMANN: No. He never led the team to the worlds series and he was never a justice of the Supreme Court. He did not turn pro in 1923. That was 1983. He was out of baseball for 10 years when injuries derailed his career. But he did not accidentally shoot off his own pitching arm and then grow a new one.
JACK: Oh, surely, you jest.
OLBERMANN: Also, if they say at any point in this film that his comeback was ordained by the church or it requires special enabling legislation by the Texas House of Representatives, don't believe them.
JACK: OK.
OLBERMANN: This all happened because he's left handed and left- handed pitchers are so scare in baseball that you don't have to be any good to last a long time. There's a man named Jesse Roscoe, who's been pitching in the major leagues since I was in college and Jack did newscasts in black and white. The movie is two hours and seven minutes long, which is very ironic because the career of the real life Jim Morris in the major leagues was only two hours and six minutes long. He pitched in 21 games. He never recorded a victory. He never got tagged for a loss. And by the way, Rachel Griffiths, who plays his wife, is not actually his wife. She's not actually a Texan. She is from Australia. And finally, to the best of my knowledge, Jim Morris never uttered the phrase, "Dude, where's my car?" So enjoy the film and get your feet off the seats.
JACK: Two hours later, you can get out into the sunlight and recover.
OLBERMANN: That's right.
JACK: By opening day, who do you like? The Diamondbacks don't repeat. The don't beat the Yankees two years in a row in the world series.
OLBERMANN: Well, first, they have to get out of their own division.
JACK: Yes.
OLBERMANN: Both the Wests are a little, kind of, a wildcard thing in the National League West and the American League West. The Diamondbacks, everything went right last year. They've already had something that's gone wrong this year, with Matt Williams, the third baseman, starting the year on the disabled list. We'll see how that one turns out.
JACK: The Yankees look pretty good.
OLBERMANN: The Yankees always look pretty good because there's a certain amount of money behind them. And they started their own TV network in the off season. That was a majors network.
JACK: Did they ask Marv for permission to use that?
OLBERMANN: Marv Albert? JACK: Yes.
OLBERMANN: No. He works for the one they jumped from. And so, they didn't ask him for anything. The Yankees don't have to ask permission. That's the part about being the Yankees...
JACK: Right.
OLBERMANN: ... or having enough money.
JACK: Yes. Do we get through the whole season without a strike? I mean, we've got -- the pieces are in place for a potential problem.
OLBERMANN: Well, the problem is that they set everything up the way it was set up in 1994. The owners are not going to lock the players out. But they're going to try to impose work rules next winter. And the players may take a preemptive judgment to have a strike in advance. But after what happened in 1994, it'd be very hard for the union to get complete support from its players to have a strike. So keep your fingers crossed.
JACK: A week or so ago, you were here and you talked about some of the negative aspects of the March madness, the NCAA tournament. But inevitably, there is a great story comes out of these. And we've got another one this year with Indiana under a new coach, two years out from under Bob Knight and playing for it all.
OLBERMANN: Well, you know, there again, the one you said what do you like about this, you chastised me with last week. And I said Indiana and the Mike Davis story. So here they are in the final game. It is a long shot that they could beat Maryland tonight. But it's an important thing to consider that in all the games that Indiana has won in the tournaments, the opposing team's big score has scored big and they've beaten them anyway. So they don't have to shut down Juan Dixon, who is the star of Maryland, to necessarily beat them. It still would be one of the great upsets in NCAA history. But it could be a good game, which is all you can ask.
JACK: You know, that happens. Villanova did it to Georgetown. And they're only, according to the books, only eight-point underdogs. That's not a huge line.
OLBERMANN: That's gambling. I don't know anything about it.
JACK: I am sure you don't. OK. You remember Marge Schott. You know about Marge Schott.
OLBERMANN: Oh, yes, I know -- that's talking about gambling.
JACK: Yes. Talk about being a little hungry, the Miss Cincinnati pageant, let me just share this with you before we get out...
OLBERMANN: She's Miss Cincinnati?
JACK: No, no, no. No. She's -- they honored her with a lifetime achievement award at the Miss Cincinnati Pageant over this past weekend. March Schott, for those of you who may have forgotten, said the following about Adolph Hitler back in 1996. "Everything you read, when he came to power, he was good. They built tremendous highways. They got all the factories going. Everybody knows he was good at the beginning but he just went too far." That and a lot of other really stupid things that came out of her mouth over the years that she owned the Cincinnati Reds baseball team.
Eventually, they got her out of major league baseball. I've no idea what she's doing now. But the Miss Cincinnati Pageant, I mean, this was the lifetime achievement award? I mean, there's a role model for the young kids trying to get that college scholarship money, isn't it?
OLBERMANN: Yes. What to not try to achieve in your life.
CAFFERTY: Yes. She's a role model for you.
OLBERMANN: Talk to you later in the week.
CAFFERTY: In fact, later in the hour...
(CROSSTALK)
OLBERMANN: Later? Cal Ripken.
CAFFERTY: Cal Ripken. Yes. Well, yes. He's the marquee attraction. I'm just the guy asking the questions.
OLBERMANN: Two old guys, talking baseball.
CAFFERTY: Tell me about it.
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