I have probably written more words about Charlie Morton than any other Pirate pitcher of the last five years, and so I’m a little embarrassed to say that it’s probably easy enough to preview Morton’s 2015 season thusly: if he’s healthy, he’ll be fine, but it’s always hard to say if Charlie Morton will be healthy.
This year Morton is dealing with recovery from hip labrum surgery and this is the second time that he’s had the surgery (meaning one on each hip) in his career. In 2011/2012, he had the surgery in October and really only missed one start; it appears he’s on a similar timeline this winter. Of course, Morton only made nine starts in 2010 before going down with Tommy John surgery, which then knocked him out until mid-season 2012. He was great in 2013 and pretty good in 2014, until a hernia in early June lead to some poor performances and a disabled list trip towards the end of the year. He made one start down the stretch, then went on the disabled list again, then had hip surgery.
Anyway, if you want to play the “arbitrary end points” game, you can lump 38 Morton starts from 2013 and 2014, before the hernia and/or hip really started to get to him in mid-July, together to create more than one full season of pretty good performance from the guy. All told in those 38 starts, Morton threw 229 1/3 innings, struck out 179 hitters, walked 69 (he also hit 32, which is not insignificant), only served up 12 home runs, and had a 3.18 ERA. That’s a perfectly serviceable third starter and a pretty good fourth starter, which is what Morton would probably be behind Cole, Liriano, and Burnett this year.
The innings are obviously a big caveat here (his career high is 171 2/3 back in 2011) just like they are for Francisco Liriano, but it’s also worth talking about his approach to left-handed hitters. Because Morton relies so heavily on his sinker, which is less deceptive to lefties, he’s always had a platoon split problem, even in his good years. Lefties had a .960 OPS against him in 2011 and an .844 OPS against him in 2013 (they were below .800 in 2012, but he only made nine starts and was clearly not right the whole year), but Morton was much more effective against them last year, holding them to a .664 OPS against.
In general, Morton’s search for a pitch to use against lefties has centered on his split-change, and even though it seems like his usage of the pitch barely bumped up in 2014 vs. 2013 (~7% from 6.3%), but if you go game-by-game, you can see that there were quite a few starts where he leaned on the pitch more heavily than he did in 2013. I think pitch values are hard to parse, but FanGraphs has it as more effective per 100 pitches last year than in the past.
Anyway, that’s pretty much it when it comes to Morton: can he stay healthy, and can he get lefties out? If he can, the Pirate rotation will be much more reliable in 2015.
<500 is an ongoing series previewing 2015 for each key Pirate in fewer than 500 words.
Photo by David Maxwell/Getty Images
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