While Charlie Morton has had a rollercoaster 2024, in what may be his final season, there's one milestone the 40-year-old has been chasing. After he secured his eighth strikeout of the night against the Giants on Tuesday, Morton joined the ranks of just 88 MLB pitchers by reaching the 2000 strikeout mark.
The Braves and Giants battled it out in a grueling 10-inning game that luckily ended with Atlanta on top with a 4-3 final. Fans have been treated to back-to-back pitching clinics from their two grizzled veterans.
Although Morton has become quite the strikeout pitcher, it's impressive that the righty was ever able to get to this point considering how his MLB career started.
Charlie Morton's 2000th career strikeout!#BravesCountry pic.twitter.com/wkVVgL8teT
— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) August 14, 2024
Charlie Morton reached 2000 strikeouts despite humble beginnings
Charlie Morton wasn't always a strikeout pitcher. When he came up with the Braves as a 24-year-old in 2008, he only struck out 5.79 per nine innings. After being traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates, the coaching staff had him lean heavily into his sinker, which earned him the moniker "Ground Chuck".
Unfortunately, this strategy did not work well for him. Through the first eight MLB seasons, Morton had a 4.54 ERA and only had 611 career strikeouts in 875.2 innings. When he signed with the Phillies at 32, he was fighting to stay in the bigs and 1000 career strikeouts wasn't even a certainty.
That season, his strikeout rate jumped from his career 15.8% to 26.8%, albeit in just 17.1 innings. This was still enough for the Houston Astros to take a chance on him, as they were likely intrigued by a 1.3 MPH increase in his fastball.
As an Astro, Morton's fastball increased another 1.6 MPH (and then another 0.4 MPH a year after that). Morton completely changed his repertoire, moving away from the sinker he had relied on so heavily with the Pirates.
With this switch, Morton finally began to pile up the strikeouts. From 2017 to 2020, Morton compiled 646 punch outs in just 546.1 innings.
Since joining the Braves in 2021, the righty has continued to rack up the strikeouts. Morton now has more than 200 more strikeouts as a member of the Braves than he did as a member of the Pirates.
Charlie Morton becomes the 89th pitcher in MLB history to reach 2000 strikeouts, and six active major leaguers, including teammate Chris Sale. He is only three strikeouts away from passing Lance Lynn on that list.
Morton is also the 22nd pitcher in MLB history to earn a win against all 30 teams. Ironically, the last rung on the ladder for Charlie was the Pittsburgh Pirates. He sealed that accomplishment at Truist Park in June.
We congratulate Ground Chuck on reaching such an impressive milestone! Hopefully, the Braves can find a way to make an impressive playoff run and send Charlie off with a World Series.