Any team acquiring Morton will get a 41-year-old sage, a two-time World Series champion and a master of reinvention who has turned a deceptive fastball and tight curve into an 18-year career.
They will also get a player unlike any other, one whose early-season underperformance exacerbated the Baltimore Orioles’ disappointing descent into last place, yet whose talent and self-awareness extracted himself from that morass into an asset desired by other teams.
Perhaps more than any big leaguer, Morton feels every dip and ascent deeply. And this season was a four-month journey that at times delved into guilt and remorse, doubt and denial – while wondering whether he should continue accepting his $15 million salary while his wife and four kids were home without him.
Those emotions won’t be far beneath the surface this week if the trade winds propel Morton to yet another destination.
“It wasn’t like, ‘Is your stuff good enough?’ It was a question of, morally and ethically, am I obligated to just shut it down because my performance wasn’t good enough? Was that the right thing to do?” Morton tells USA TODAY Sports a day before his July 29 start, which could be his final home outing at Camden Yards.
“You have a team where there’s a lot of expectation and you’re a big part of the reason why the team’s struggling. Once every five or six days I go out there and I stink, then you start thinking, how long is this going to take to work out?”
Turns out it was less than a month.
‘Is this right or wrong?’
While the Orioles would find greater depths, rock bottom for Morton came April 20, an Easter Sunday start in which he gave up seven runs but recorded just seven outs against the Cincinnati Reds, a 24-2 throttling that portended grimmer things for the 9-12 Orioles.
Morton’s plight was even uglier. After five starts, his ERA was 10.89. Opponents were batting .352 and reaching base at a .442 clip. His fastball still crackled and his curveball snapped, but he was getting pummeled, the details still fresh in his mind.
“I remember taking off my jersey after the Reds start – I think I gave up seven or eight runs in two innings – and that’s when I started to think, man, is this right or wrong?” he says. “Which is crazy to think about. That out of how many hundreds of games I’ve pitched in my professional career, that after five starts, you still allow yourself to question how good you are. How bad it is. Or how much better it can be.
“It’s really irrational. At the same time, it’s not. You’ve only got so much time. You only have so many starts in a season. The team only has so many starts it can give the ball to you before, ‘Alright, Charlie…’
“But I think the emotional part of it was more, I’m now paying my time and worth to be here. Instead of at home with my family. I continued to play because there were some personal reasons and personal feelings I had where I felt like I wasn’t done yet.
“So when you’re sitting here on a 12 ERA after five starts and you’re thinking, there’s our owner and our general manager, our manager, our pitching coach and my teammates, the fans. All those people are counting on you. Your kids are counting on you at home.
“And so you’re paying the price of time to be here. And the team is giving you their time and money to be here. It’s a very philosophically conflicting place to be. That’s what made it hard.”
Thankfully, crawling out of it wasn’t as emotionally heavy as falling in.
‘The reason you’re there is because you stink’
Morton has pitched for a half-dozen franchises since his 2008 debut, including two stints with Atlanta, toiling for double-digit pitching coaches. He’s lived the modern pitching evolution, debuting two years before the iPad hit the market and persevering long enough to see pitchers rely on it like an infant needs their binkie.
To this point, he gives significant credit to Orioles pitching coach Drew French for his emotional bandwidth and possessing, as Morton says, “a feeling you have, a trust in the best ones I’ve worked with.
“It’s not just, can they talk about executing a pitch at the knees or spinning a breaking ball, or, can you read a Trackman chart. Most of ‘em, it’s found in the personality and the character of the person. For me, Frenchy was a really big deal for me this year, talking me through some stuff.”
Yet some things can only be solved from within.
With Morton still averaging better than 94 mph on both his four-seam fastball and sinker, the problems were not with his arm, or his pitch grip or repertoire, nor anything that he said could be found “on a skeletal model or on video.”
Instead, it was buried within the subtle elements that have enabled Morton to win 144 career games and continue hearing his phone ring each winter, with contract offers good enough to lure him from his Connecticut home.
Touch and feel. Balance. Timing. Those things can get lost in the early-season blitzkrieg, where bad starts compounded and a trip to the bullpen was truly the only way Morton could slow it down and recalibrate.
Morton’s ego could handle the demotion, save for what it represented.
“The reason why you’re there is because you stink. Because you’re not good enough to pitch in the rotation,” he says. “And someone that literally just signed you two months ago thinks you’re not good enough to pitch in the rotation. Or would benefit from pitching out of the bullpen.
“That’s a whole different cycle, a whole different process. It’s emotional, it’s mental, it’s physical – a whole new set of challenges.
“I was allowed to go through a process that I could start to really feel what I was doing. And try to find that feeling again – the balance in my lower half. The tempo that I’m used to. And that really kind of makes me who I am.”
His resurrection occurred far quicker than could be imagined on his Easter nadir. He still remembers the moment – a bullpen session in Anaheim on May 10, his father’s birthday – where the touch and the feel and the balance were there.
Morton pitched two perfect innings that day, returned to the rotation two weeks later and has been mostly superb since. In 13 games, including 10 starts, he’s struck out 71 batters in 63 ⅔ innings, posted a 3.53 ERA and given up seven home runs – after giving up five in his first 20 innings pitched.
He’s also pitched just 95 ⅓ innings, offering a relatively fresh arm for a contender with November dreams.
‘There’s just regret’
It’s been a decade since Morton’s been traded, a December 2015 swap in which Pittsburgh shipped him across the state to Philadelphia. It was then that Morton began a transformation that wouldn’t fully take until he signed with the Houston Astros before the 2017 season.
And they still call him Charlie Bleeping Morton (complimentary) in Houston.
He went 29-10 in two seasons there, most notably pitching the last four innings of World Series Game 7 in 2017, a Fall Classic where he gave up one run in 10 ⅓ innings.
Two seasons in Tampa Bay brought a raucous 2019 playoff run and a trip to the COVID bubble World Series in 2020. Morton was still coming down from that emotional six-game loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers when Atlanta GM Alex Anthopoulos called, asking if he wanted to be a Brave.
One year later, he started Game 1 of the World Series at Houston, but a Yuli Gurriel line drive struck him in the right leg. Morton steeled himself against the pain, threw 16 pitches and finished the fourth inning, retiring three batters.
On a broken fibula.
The Braves would win the game and the World Series, and it’s not just the extra jewelry Morton would bring to a contender seeking pitching.
And yet, there’s still the lingering feeling of what could’ve been in Baltimore, dampening any excitement he might harbor about gaining a few spots in the standings via trade, let alone the uncertainty of getting uprooted.
“Really, the only way I think I can explain it is, how would you feel?” he says. “Maybe younger guys, there’s more excitement in the anticipation. I’ve gotten to pitch in a few World Series. Got to pitch in a bunch of playoff games. Got to be on a bunch of really good teams.
“For me, having actually contributed to the successes of teams in the past, being here right now, getting to know everybody here, I want them to feel that, too. And that, for me, is sad. Because I know I didn’t do my part for that to happen. I finally start to get to know everybody in here, start to feel that connection with everybody in the room, and if that’s the direction the team’s going, it’s too late.
“It’s too late on the baseball side. It’s not too late on the friendship side. That’s more where I am mentally and emotionally. There’s just regret.”
By week’s end, there may be a seventh team added to Morton’s career grid, or perhaps a return engagement in Houston or Philly. Either way, come November, he’ll converse with his family, “weigh everything through the lens of a husband and a father,” he says, and decide whether he wants to do this for a 19th season.
His children are now 12, 10, 8 and 6, Morton and his wife taking on the impossible task constructing a cost-benefit ratio of another year of a well-paying job versus the pull of home life.
“And then it’s like, well, OK, is it the right fit?” says Morton. “Is it the right place? Is it something we can make work?”
Morton almost always seems to pull that part off.
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