Welcome back to Routine Moments in Baseball History, a running weekday feature that looks back at plays that have been ignored by the history books because history books only talk about things that are important or interesting. Today's installment is "A Fomer Hero Grounds Out."It's a matter of historical record that the 2001 Pittsburgh Pirates were losers. They lost blowouts, they lost close games, they lost at night and during the day, they were bad at home and abysmal on the road, they had a losing record every month until October, they scored the second fewest runs in the major leagues, allowed the third most runs, and had the fourth most errors. Their record at the end of the year was 62-100. If you want a reason they were so lousy, you could point to all the injuries suffered by their starting pitchers, but even if they had remained healthy they wouldn't have been able to climb out of the National League Central cellar. They were just plain bad, bad enough that on August 7, in a home game against the Los Angeles Dodgers, they brought in Warren Morris as a pinch hitter.
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Pirates fans might remember Morris for his promising rookie season, when he hit 15 home runs and batted .288 with a .787 OPS as the team's starting second baseman. Then he faded the way some young players do (pitchers figured him out, or his luck ran out, who knows why these things happen?), and by 2001 he was on the bench most of the time. The lack of regular plate appearances didn't help his hitting—always a free swinger, he walked just three times in 109 plate appearances that year and had an ugly .239 on-base percentage—but it was the Pirates, so he found himself pinch hitting in the bottom of the eighth with his team down 2-1.When I imagine Morris in the box facing Dodgers reliever Mike Trombley on that muggy Pittsburgh night, I think about how long good memories last before they get buried under the weight of the present. See, while Morris was not a good major league player, in 1996 he delivered one of the most dramatic moments in College World Series history, hitting a walk-off two-out two-run homer to win the championship for LSU. It's amazing to watch the video of that event: Morris swings on the first pitch, drives a fastball on a frozen rope just barely into the stands, and by the time he's rounding first he's jumping up and down and pumping his fist and yelling, though he probably couldn't hear himself over the roar of the crowd. Opposing Miami players literally fell to the ground in disappointment and stayed there as if they had been shot. If Morris was thinking about anything in that moment, he might have been conscious of it being the best few seconds of his life so far.He probably thought back to that at-bat dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of times since—it was in his head while he got drafted by the Texas Rangers in the fifth round of the 1996 draft, and when he got traded to the Pittsburgh system in 1998, and when he worked his way up to the big leagues in 1999. By the time he got up to the plate to face Trombley, however, there had been a lot of at-bats since his most famous one, and the more recent plate appearances had gone bad. It was a key moment in the game, a chance for him to deliver, but Morris wasn't a hero anymore, he was a just guy struggling to hang onto his job.The 2001 Pirates weren't a team that made dreams come true. Morris grounded out meekly to second, the Pirates went down in order in both the eighth and the ninth, and the second baseman would get released at the end of the year.This has been Routine Moments in Baseball History. Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.