Rarely has a hurler’s signature pitch so perfectly matched his name as the wondrous hammer spun by our not-quite-but-almost ageless Uncle Charlie Morton.
(Of course, plenty of hurlers have had nicknames that did their best pitch justice, but has anyone ever had a given name that worked half so well? JonathanF, this is your bat-signal! Kutter Crawford, klearly, still has a long way to go.)
Want to know something weird? By WAR and ERA+, last year was Charlie Morton’s fourth or fifth-best season. It didn’t necessarily feel that way at the time! After his magical 2021 season ended in injury in the World Series, his 2022 season was pretty consistently mediocre, victimized by a near-doubling of his homer rate. But his 2022 xFIP of 3.60 was three-quarters of a run lower than his ERA, suggesting that his results were far worse than his ability, and then his 2023 ERA of 3.64 tracked that prediction almost exactly.
However, this year was a mirror image of the one previous. In 2023, Morton’s xERA regressed by almost the same amount as it had previously improved, which explains the frequent heartburn of watching his starts last year! Despite the sparkling ERA, something was amiss in his components this season. While his home run rate fell to a near-career low, his walks climbed to a career high and his strand rate rose to its second-highest mark ever.
Moreover, since his career renaissance began in Philadelphia, his fastball has generally been a moderately positive pitch for him, but hitters began to feast on it in 2022, and last year they just annihilated it. Per baseball-savant, he was in the second percentile for fastball run value, which is especially astonishing as his velocity remained in the 64th percentile. So, it felt like a tightrope walk a lot of the time.
For what it’s worth, ZiPS projects Charlie for a 4.09 ERA and 2.4 WAR next year – that’s basically a 3/4 starter, and well worth the $20 million salary. And the system does not see too much variability around that mean: his 80th-percentile outcome is 3.5 WAR (3.35 ERA), 20th-percentile is 1.1 WAR (4.95 ERA), or roughly a #2 starter versus a #5 starter. To put it another way, Morton’s floor is still a lot higher than what the team got from Jared Shuster, Yonny Chirinos, Dylan Dodd, and, sadly, Michael Soroka. He’s still really important to this team, particularly given the injuries and stalled development of many of our top pitching prospects.
Of course, his 20th-percentile prediction isn’t his absolute floor, it’s just what currently seems like his likely floor among the most probable range of outcomes. After all, he’s 40, nine months older than Max Scherzer, and pitching ineffectiveness is like bankruptcy: it comes gradually, then suddenly. So despite Morton’s extraordinary durability and seeming predictability, there are no sure things.
Of course, aging gracefully is all about understanding how to make the most of what your body’s giving you now. Charlie’s a few days younger than I am, and while he’s got to figure out how to make do with the reduced effectiveness of his fastball, I’ve got to figure out how to hit Ryan’s deadlines for offseason Braves player reviews, and I can say without fear of contradiction that neither of us is quite what we once were.
But, ultimately, both of us are motivated by the same goal: a fifth title. I think we all expected Charlie to hang up his cleats after the interviews he gave at the end of the season, clearly unwilling to say the “r” word but also seemingly nearly made up in his mind. Yet here he is, back in the clubhouse, and considering the firepower up and down the roster, I can’t say I blame him. This is one lineup that I’d imagine any pitcher who ever lived would thrill to pitch in front of.
Nobody ever won anything over the winter, and there’s a lot more offseason to go. The Kelenic deal was a nifty way to take a chance on someone else’s damaged goods, but the best team in the league spent $800 million to bring in one of the best hitters and one of the best pitchers in baseball, and also Tyler Glasnow.
Re-signing Charlie Morton for one more year was a good move. We’re going to need more. Get it done, Wren.
Bob Walk?
Darcy Fast?
Colin Holderman?
OK… those are not given names.
Walker Buhler walks 2.3 per 9 IP.
Does Shota Imanaga have a good shuuto?
Is Charlie going to have to have a really bad season to declare retirement? I’ve got to think this is his last $20M season.
Josh Outman and Grant Balfour would like a word. Homer Bailey is just sad.
Sorry to quibble, but I actually think it’s much easier to come up with players whose names align to outcomes (or other related nouns) – homer, walk, balfour – aren’t actually pitch types. It’s been much harder to find pitchers whose names are pitches, or pitch nicknames! In the minor leagues, apparently there was a Rac Slider and a Ray Slider; there was a Philip Knuckles; there was, even, once, a Cheese Goggans.
But nothing remotely that wonderful in the majors. It ain’t easy!
OK… then I’m sticking with Darcy Fast. He only won one MLB game, but he’s in the Warner Pacific University Hall of Fame.
Can I have Al Downing? (Pop Rising never pitched…Nor did Charlie Frisbee)
How about Shea Spitzbarth? (Not that he’s been caught.)
Per B-R, there was a Speedball Hackett who pitched a total of 6 2/3 innings over two cups of coffee in the Negro Leagues in 1927-28. There was also a Speed Martin who pitched to a 3.78 ERA over 6 seasons, mostly with the Cubs, from 1917-1922.
And can we count Braden Looper here?
There is also Slow Joe Doyle, who amassed 4.9 WAR over five seasons from 1906-1910, mostly with the Yankees. Maybe a BIT of a stretch, but he feels admissible to me: he apparently got the nickname not from the speed of his pitches per se, but how long he took between them; per B-R: “Doyle got his nickname Slow Joe because he was a very slow working pitcher – he would take a lot of time between pitches, often stalling for notable amounts of time.” Slow Joe woulda fit right in pre-pitch clock.
EDIT: I got so excited for the chance to dither around on B-R that I missed that you said given name, not nickname. Welp, maybe just Braden Looper then. Though I did also just discover he had a cousin Aaron Looper, who apparently got a brief call-up with Seattle in 2003.
The Giants had a terrible pitcher named Chris Hook in the 90’s, and that works on 2 levels. There was also a sub-replacement-level pitcher named Jay Hook who pitched mostly terribly for Casey Stengel’s Mets–probably the worst team in history over a 4 year period.
We have a new thread from Snowshine.
Braves Double-A club in Pearl, Miss., moving to Columbus, Ga., in 2025.
Columbus, apparently, is putting some real money into renovating Golden Park & its surrounding area on the Chattahoochee River.
https://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/local/article283999643.html