Charlie Morton, who recently signed with the Orioles to pitch in his age-41 season, is perhaps known best for his late-career breakout after heading to Houston in 2017. Despite being a solid-if-unspectacular starter for a decade in the big leagues, he completely transformed himself at age-32/33, and was a borderline star for the next five years, before settling back into a “very solid” starter role the last three years.
It was a rare later-career turn of the kind you’re kind of always hoping your own organization could make happen. To connect it to a former teammate of Morton’s, it’d be a bit like Jameson Taillon all of a sudden becoming an ace this year in his own age-33 season. It is rare and unexpected. (Hey, Taillon did post his best ERA since 2018 last season, so maybe …. )
How does a thing like that happen, anyway? I thought Morton’s comments at FanGraphs on at least part of the equation were interesting:
“[The Astros] had a little board room and a projection screen with charts and graphs, and they were suggesting to me to throw pitches in locations where I would get no swings, or a swing-and-miss. For seven years with Pittsburgh, I was trying to get the ball on the ground with three pitches or less, and now they’re telling me, ‘Don’t let them hit it’… you’re not relying on the fate of where the ball is going, you are relying on your stuff.”
On the one hand, that seems so obvious: if you can change your approach to miss bats, do that! Guys who can find a way to increase their strikeout rate from the 16% range to the 28% range, as Morton did, should definitely do that! And if it’s so simple as just working to different areas with your pitches, hey, give it a try.
On the other hand, it’s important to point out that Morton’s breakout did come along with a near two-MPH bump in velocity across the board, so I think there was probably a little more at play than just tweaking his pitch mix and pointing out where he can get more whiffs. Still, it does highlight how working with a new organization can lead to some direct changes in performance that maybe only the acquiring team knows they want to try. The Astros knew exactly what they wanted Morton, at age-33, to do differently, and they essentially got themselves a short-term ace for it.
This whole thing got me off on a bit of an aside: I don’t disagree with Morton (or the Astros), but I want to point out that if you have the skill to get more grounders without sacrificing your stuff, that’s obviously a good thing, too. In Morton’s case, it was worth losing some 10 percentage points on his groundball rate in exchange for 12-ish% more strikeouts. That’s an easy yes if you can make that trade.
But more broadly, I think folks have gotten too far away from looking at groundball rate as an evaluative measure of pitcher performance and projection. We rarely hear about it, and I try to highlight it when I think a guy does it very well. I’m not saying the obvious stuff (K, BB, barrel, SwSt, CSW, etc.) doesn’t maybe guide a little more in pitcher evaluation, but ever since the public love for the sinker died (in the face of the fly ball revolution), just seems like we don’t value guys enough for getting a lot of groundballs in addition to the other things.
All else equal, a ball on the ground is muuuuch better for a pitcher than a ball in the air:
Groundballs in 2024: .245/.245/.269/41 wRC+
Fly balls in 2024: .217/.212/.642/126 wRC+
Line drives in 2024: .701/.695/.900/359 wRC+
There’s a reason batters want to elevate, you know?
The Cubs, by the way, don’t exactly have a lot of groundball specialists, despite their infield defense suggesting it would be worth having them. Justin Steele led all Cubs pitchers in 2024 at just 44.8%, which was 124th(!) in baseball (min. 50 innings). If Wrigley’s conditions flip this year and become much more friendly to fly balls, it could be an issue to not have some more groundball-oriented pitchers on the staff.
Hey, there’s still some offseason left!