Something to say
Contrite Morton can keep cheating ex-mates from title
HOUSTON — He is, by The Post’s unofficial yet confident accounting, the second-most contrite 2017 Astro.
And he gets first say on stopping what’s left of that group — a crucial contingent — from achieving significant vindication.
“I never questioned how good those guys were and how good they are. So that’s my focus,” Charlie Morton said Monday at Minute Maid Park, as he prepared to start Tuesday night’s World Series Game 1 for the Braves against his former team. “I’m pitching against a really good baseball team. These are really important games. They’re really important starts. So that’s my mentality.”
Which is to be expected. Morton is a baseball pitcher, not Dr. Richard Kimble of “The Fugitive” trying to track down his wife’s real killer and liberate himself. Yet if you want to know how the right-hander feels about being associated with arguably the most tarnished championship in the history of North American professional sports history, I submit to you Exhibit A: Morton’s comments on Feb. 8, 2020, just a few weeks after Rob Manfred released his report on the ’17 Astros.
“I was aware of the banging,” Morton, then with the Rays, acknowledged to some Tampa Bay reporters. “Being in the dugout, you could hear it. I don’t know when it dawned on me, but you knew it was going on . ... Personally, I regret not doing more to stop it. I don’t know what that would have entailed. I think the actions would have been somewhat extreme to stop it. That’s a hypothetical.”
He continued: “I certainly have thought about it a lot because it negatively impacted the game, and people’s perception of the game, the fans, opposing players. And that doesn’t sit well with me. Where I was at the time, I don’t know where I was. Because what’s wrong is wrong. And I’ll never be absolved of that.”
Of course, he and his fellow Astros very well might have gotten away with it if not for the actions of the most contrite member of that club, Morton’s fellow Astros pitcher Mike Fiers, who put his name on the allegations to The Athletic for a story published in November 2019. But if Fiers changed the fate of Major League Baseball, fate keeps inviting Morton to limit the ’Stros, born in 1962 as the Colt 45s, to that single, soiled championship.
For last year, with the Rays, Morton faced his old pals in the American League Championship Series and beat them twice, including the do-or-die Game 7 after the Astros had won three straight. And here he is again after leaving the Rays for the Braves, who have put together a true underdog story by overcoming the loss of their best player Ronald Acuna Jr. to slay first the Brewers and then the Dodgers this month.
“Coming back here, it’s only natural you’re going to feel something,” Morton said. “What that is, I don’t know.”
From the Astros’ side, there is only warmth. Jose Altuve described Morton as “the best [teammate] you can ever have. He’s that good. He’s amazing.” The injured Lance McCullers Jr., who followed Morton’s five shutout innings with four shutout innings to blank the Yankees in 2017 ALCS Game 7 here, said of Morton, “He’s a very special guy, and he’s impacted a lot of guys in this clubhouse and a lot of guys who are no longer in this clubhouse.”
Altuve, Alex Bregman, Carlos Correa and Yuli Gurriel constitute the Astros’ 2021 infield, just as they did in ’17. They remain the core of this club, and if you think they’re not thinking about their place in baseball history, keep in mind that Correa told The Washington Post after Friday night’s ALCS clincher, “Our motivation is to show the world how great we really are.”
Of this group, Correa has expressed the most contrition, yet he has blended it with defiance. Morton, whose primary sin was silence, can speak up now, in his own way. He can graduate from contrition to prevention.