Charlie Morton: Michael Soroka shows strength, professionalism amid injuries

Quietly, while Braves fans focused on their major-league team’s 9-4 start, Soroka has been off to a good start in Gwinnett. He’s had two outings, allowing two runs on seven hits over 7-2/3 innings. He’s struck out eight and walked two. Soroka threw 69 pitches in his latest start Tuesday as he continues building himself back into form.

“The numbers look good,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said. “It looks like he’s doing really well.”

Perhaps the long-awaited day Soroka rejoins the major-league roster isn’t too far away. When that time comes, it will be emotional for everybody involved. A true story of perseverance and mental toughness in the face of unprecedented misfortune.

Soroka, an All-Star in 2019 and the Braves’ opening-day starter in 2020, still has a whole career ahead of him. He doesn’t turn 26 until August.

“There are far fewer Achilles injuries, especially in baseball, than Tommy John (surgeries),” Morton, 39, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “So right then and there, you’re dealing with an injury and a surgery and recovery that is less predictable. Then you go through the rehab, and he got hurt as he’s coming back.

“That’s something that very few people have gone through in sports where, especially professional sports, where you have a very significant injury that affects not only your return to play, but also your day to day, because your lower extremity injuries like that, they’re affecting you just getting around. That’s a struggle. Then to reinjure it, and to have that kind of time frame, is something I’ve never experienced.”

Morton takes pride in helping the organization’s younger players – it’s one reason the Braves signed him before the 2021 season – and he’s a shining example of what Soroka hopes to become. Despite his past few years getting disrupted, Soroka wants to have that same longevity.

“I think it’s not losing sight of the big picture,” Soroka said. “Talking to Charlie a lot in spring training on some of the battles that he went through early in his career, and he had a bunch. Some more difficult ones were his hips, hammy, some other things that he had to figure out before he really kind of came into his own. (I have to) kind of play the long game a little bit.”

In spring 2018, before Soroka had appeared in the majors, one Braves employee shared how blown away he was with Soroka’s maturity, especially among his peers (the team was loaded with pitching prospects at that time). The individual noted not only how often Soroka asked questions, but what those questions were. He’s always been considered wise beyond his years, even as a teenager.

But there’s no substitute for experience, as Snitker always says. Extending one’s career like Morton requires big-picture thinking. As Soroka rehabbed, he thought about his healthy future, too.

“I think just the fact that you have to be hardheaded sometimes and not give up on the work that needs to be done to be the pitcher that you want to be one, two, three, five, 10 years from now,” Soroka said of Morton’s advice. “It’s a constant process. A lot of times you get in a rhythm where you want to work on something, but you abandon it just to be able to go out there and compete. I think that’s the balance that we’ve talked about.”

While Soroka rebuilds himself at Triple-A, Morton – a member of the Braves’ 2002 draft class – is trying to help the team capture its sixth consecutive National League East title. He’s pitched for two World Series winners since 2017 and has excelled on grand stages in the latter portion of his career. At almost 40, he’s making $20 million this year and again expected to be a reliable innings eater.

Morton wasn’t always all that. When he was Soroka’s age, it was unclear whether he would have much of a career at all. He made his debut at 24 – a year younger than current Soroka – and needed three seasons to establish himself.

Morton had a 6.15 ERA in 16 games for the Braves before he was traded to Pittsburgh. In 2009-10 with the Pirates, he had a 5.91 ERA in 35 starts. He figured it out, posting a 3.72 ERA over the next three seasons. But he again hit a rough patch, posting a 4.74 ERA from 2015-16. He wound up with the Astros afterward, in his age 33 season, and his career took off to a front-line-starter level.

It was a winding path to reach that point. In 2010, when Morton was 1-9 with an ERA over 9.00, he was placed on the injured list with shoulder fatigue and was demoted to Triple-A.

“There’s been a lot going on, and I’m grateful every day for the talent I was blessed with,” Morton told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at that time. “I’m just working to make sure that I can really get back to where I want to be, do everything that I want to do in baseball.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be good. I just needed to grow up, and this (demotion) has helped me. I am still in the process of that. It’s because this game is so fun and you’re still a kid. I’m just a kid off the field, I really am. But I’m still learning the competitive aspects of this game.”

In 2023, it’s almost hard to imagine Morton feeling unsure if he would assemble a successful career.

Soroka likewise has a leveled perspective during difficulty. His challenges weren’t initially mental – his body simply hasn’t cooperated – but as his physical recovery continues, the mind plays an important role. Soroka has said when he re-ruptured his Achilles in 2021, he wondered if that was the end of his career.

Injuries were part of Morton’s journey, too, as he told Soroka. He had Tommy John surgery in 2012. He had hip injuries in 2011 and 2014. He had a hamstring injury in 2016. Even in 2021, during his Game 1 start for the Braves in the World Series, Morton broke his leg.

“So I mean, I think I have enough experience to talk about some of that stuff,” Morton told the AJC. “But what Michael is going through, that’s different because you have this time frame that they give you. You sit down with a doctor, and they have it all mapped out. Like with Tommy John, I feel like you get out of it what you put in. … That’s a little bit different than Michael’s situation. But I feel like I’ve tried to just be transparent, as caring as possible when talking to guys that have gone through a lot of the same things that I’ve gone through.”

There was no traditional timetable for Soroka’s recovery, given the circumstance’s uniqueness. He and the Braves are still learning as he continues building himself back. That isn’t lost on Morton, who applauded Soroka’s courage.

“I can only imagine going through the rehab, putting the work in, all of the time and effort and the hope,” he said. “Michael is a hard worker, and he’s a pro. He wants to take care of what he’s got to take care of. For him to go through that and to get back, and then go through it all over again, it shows a level of strength and professionalism that not many people get to display. It’s hard. I know that he’s not only working on rehab, but he’s also been working on trying to improve his delivery to be more efficient, and just try to stay healthy. So he’s been going through a lot of changes.

“He made a lot of changes, not only in time put in to the rehab, but also to trying to mechanically get better trying to understand his body better, probably to the point where it was driving him a little crazy. It’s really hard to do that. It’s not really hard to go get surgery, like to go get a repair, like there’s pain. And it’s an inconvenience. There’s a lot of discomfort for a couple of weeks. But the real hard part is just getting up every day and putting everything you have into it getting back when you know that you’re not going to receive the results immediately. Then also the fact that he did it twice. For lack of a better word, it’s impressive to see him and to know how hard he’s worked.”