An M.L.B. Pitcher Keeps Hitting Batters. They Love Him Anyway.

It happens often enough that Charlie Morton ought to launch a line of greeting cards to apologize to all the opponents he’s drilled over the years. He could call them Ballmark Cards, a nod to the circular bruise he’s left on batters at a rate unmatched in baseball history.

Morton’s hit-by-pitch total of 184 is by far the most among active hurlers.

Morton, 40, ranks ninth on the all-time HBP chart and he’s rising faster than a welt. With three more HBPs, he’ll move into seventh place on the list, despite pitching at least 900 fewer innings than anyone else in the top 10.

The thing is, Morton said he feels lousy about it, all 184 times, which is why he is also the active leader in mea culpas.

After drilling the Rockies’ Todd Helton in a 2009 game at Coors Field, the pitcher bunted in his next at-bat. “I was running down to first and as I passed him I said, ‘Sorry, Todd,’’ Morton recalled. “And I was running back to the dugout. And I felt his glove hit me in the fanny.”

All was forgiven, as usual. Opponents have long understood that Morton’s HBPs come with a level of TLC.

“He’s a great guy,’’ said Mets first baseman Pete Alonso, whom Morton has nailed five times, tying him with Jon Jay as Morton’s most frequent landing spot.

“I had an X-ray on my elbow. Charlie actually came down and saw me and checked to see if everything was OK,’’ Giants outfielder Mike Yastrzemski said, rubbing again on the spot Morton lit up on the Fourth of July.

Former first baseman Casey Kotchman, the first batter Morton ever hit, in 2008, sent a glowing text: “I’m truly honored to be Charlie’s first HBP recipient. It’s great that he didn’t stop after me and the bruise didn’t go to waste. If only, I could still be playing to be his last recipient.”

Indeed, the mild-mannered Morton, who comes with avuncular nicknames like “Uncle Charlie” and “Ground Chuck,” seems like an unlikely candidate to rank so highly on the all-time pain distribution list.

Somehow, though he’s hit more batters than two of baseball’s most notorious brushback gods, Don Drysdale (154) and Bob Gibson (102). Morton has also hit more batters than Black and Blue combined (Bud drilled 49 batters; Vida nailed 23). He’s nicked more hitters than Sal “The Barber” Maglie (44). He’s plunked more batters than Eric Plunk (32). (We’ll check back in a few years on Tigers rookie Brant Hurter.)

But it’s important to understand the same thing hitters do: Morton isn’t a head-hunter. He’s an ankle-biter. Of the 184 times Morton has hit a batter, 104 were on curveballs, according to Mike Rosenthal, a statistician for Giants broadcasts who did some digging on Sportsradar during a recent game.

The most common HBP scenario is that the right-handed Morton yanks one of his trademarked breaking balls too far inside to a left-handed batter and hits him on the back foot. Morton throws with a famously high spin rate that can top 3,000 RPMs, and the lefties in the batter’s box can’t escape the late horizontal movement.

“That’s not natural to deal with,’’ Yastrzemski said. “It’s not normal to see somebody that can spin it over 3,000 RPMs like that, so you’re going to have a lot of late reactions. You’re going to have some guys get hit on pitches that they probably even thought were strikes.”

In his career, Morton has hit 121 left-handed batters and 63 righties. Either way, it hurts. That goes for the pitcher, too.

“I’m a human being who has empathy,’’ Morton said. “I can remember thinking, like, now you gotta wake up with a bruise. Or maybe I did something to a bone. You’re going to roll out of bed with a black-and-blue mark somewhere because I drilled you.”

Morton spoke about the mechanics and etiquette of HBPs during an expansive interview at his locker earlier this month, a day after drilling Giants infielder Brett Wisely for No. 183. The Braves veteran also struck out his 2,000th batter in that game, a remarkable feat for a late-blooming two-time All-Star. But it was more interesting to hear him share the inside story of pitching inside.

After all, it’s how Morton is leaving his mark.

The top 10 for hit-by-pitches is an odd place for a modern man. Of that group, the only pitchers besides Morton to take the mound after 1927 are fireballer Randy Johnson (190, tied for fifth) and knuckleballer Tim Wakefield (186, seventh).

The other players on the leaderboard were born in the 1800s, back when baseball was rough-and-tumble and somehow every player came with a gloriously fanciful Dickensian backstory.

Gus Wheying, the all-time leader with 277, pitched from 1887 to 1901 and accumulated nicknames that included “Cannonball” and “Rubber-Winged Gus.” The son of a saloonkeeper was listed at 5-4, 145 pounds, which, according to the Brooklyn Eagle in 1890, “gave no indication of the muscular power necessary to manipulate the ball at the speed with which he delivers it.”

Wheying’s rabble-rousing off the field included a trip to a Brooklyn beer hall detailed by the SABR Bio Project:

As the group enjoyed an ample quantity of German lager, it was suggested that Weyhing might keep his “arm in practice” by tossing a sandwich at the finely painted ceiling. With a rapid succession of sloppy sandwich missiles “hurled with unerring precision,” Weyhing transformed a fresco of Gambrinus “into a huge plot of butter and mustard.”

Second on the list is Chick Fraser (219), who Honus Wagner once accused of inventing the spitball. Third on the list is Pink Hawley (210), whose ancestor, Major Joseph Hawley, ordered the Boston Tea Party.

This is the company Uncle Charlie keeps.

“Yeah, all very, very different,’’ Morton said. “And they all threw 1,000 more innings than I did.”

The pitcher cited another reason current pitchers might never approach the career totals of Gus, Chick and Pink. The game’s vigilantism has faded over time, with beanball wars more carefully regulated by MLB officials and by players who are increasingly loath to inflict a long-term injury.

“I’m sure that people don’t like that. ‘Quit being so soft,’’’ Morton said. “But, yeah, it’s changed a lot since when I was younger. Because as guys go from team to team, the culture of the game has changed. It’s become a little more sensitive to the humanity of it and the reality that a lot of guys now throw really hard. You can put somebody’s career in jeopardy, certainly your season in jeopardy.”

Looking back, he’s sure a wayward pitch of his resulted in one or more of his teammates taking one off the shoulder in retaliation. But he is grateful that such baseball warfare is no longer automatic. Players understand intent.

Gone are the days when Drysdale made payback an essential element of his persona. The Dodgers Hall of Famer once said: “My own little rule was two for one — if one of my teammates got knocked down, then I knocked down two on the other team.”

It might sound funny coming from the runaway active HBP leader, but Morton says good riddance to those days.

“It’s allowed hitters to be more focused on what they’re trying to do as opposed to, ‘What is this guy trying to do? Is he trying to throw up and in on me? Is he gonna buzz my tower?’ Did I swing at that too hard?’’ Morton said. “Because that’s what guys used to worry about, right?”

“You would see it all the all the time. They would get balls thrown at the shoulders or the head. Yard sale, right? Like, everything goes. They’re on the ground, on their back. Guys are getting hit in the head! And the best they can do is just kind of turn, hope that doesn’t hit their face.”

Morton said that when he first came up, etiquette meant never saying sorry. If you drilled a batter, even by accident, tough cookies.

“You didn’t even acknowledge it,’’ he said. “It was like, ‘Dude, it’s part of the game.’ Whatever happens, happens.”

But he appreciates the new unspoken rules that allow him to care, and to say so even right there from the mound. “I think that there’s room for acknowledging the mistake,’’ Morton said.

His reputation as an accidental assassin helps. Morton drilled Alonso with a 97 mph fastball, a night after the slugger hit a big home run against the Braves and talked some smack while doing it.

It looked suspiciously as if Morton was letting his heater do the talking. He threw an inside fastball in for a swinging strike. Then he followed with another inside fastball that blasted Alonso in the wrist and sent him sprawling to the ground in agony.

Morton said he approached Alonso later to clear the air about his intent. As it turns out, he didn’t need to say a word.

“I went to talk to Pete and he’s like, ‘Yeah, you saw me. I got beat by the first one. And knew you were coming back in there to beat me again,’’’ Morton said, adding that his arm dragged on that pitch and the ball wound up a foot off the plate.

Alonso remembered it the same way.

“If you mistime something, hey, it happens, on accident,’’ the Mets slugger said last week. “(Morton) is super intelligent. He’s had a super great career. I just think pitchers are just trying to rip stuff, and if their mechanics aren’t perfect, that’s just what happens.”

The accidents still stick with Morton. He still feels rotten about hitting Mark Reynolds in 2010. “I tried to throw a heater somewhere at the top of the zone, and I just ran it up on him,’’ he said. “Like, I don’t even know where it hit him, you know? That’s the scary part of the game.”

Morton drilled Mark Reynolds on April 9, 2010, and still feels rotten about it. (Ross D. Franklin / Associated Press)

In a start this month against the Giants, Morton carried a 3-2 lead into the fourth inning. With two outs and a runner at first, Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow began to marvel over Morton’s epic HBP total. Krukow could barely fathom a pitcher approaching 200, noting he’d hit just 47 batters in his 14-year career.

Just then, Morton’s first-pitch curveball burrowed into Brett Wisely’s right knee as if it had a tracking device.

“On cue,’’ broadcast partner Duane Kuiper said wryly.

It was the prototypical Morton missile — a curveball yanked inside to a left-hander and crashing hard into a lower extremity. The big bender was the key to Morton’s mid-career reinvention. Modern metrics helped reveal an almost supernatural spin rate on his curveball. Coaches with the Philadelphia Phillies (2016) and the Houston Astros (2017-2018) helped him maximize that gift. Thanks to an overhauled approach that emphasized strikeouts, Morton now throws curveballs nearly 40 percent of the time.

His breaking ball comes in at 78-82 mph, but that’s not always a solace to batters on the receiving end.

“Tell you what,’’ Krukow said of Wisely, “that thing felt as bad as taking 95 (mph) in the ribs. … And that lit him up like a Roman candle.”

The next day, when informed that there were 182 victims before him, Wisely was hardly surprised. He said that Morton threw him four inside curveballs in his first at-bat, and it was so hard to pick up the spin out the pitcher’s hand that he struck out swinging.

Brett Wisely took a curveball off his kneecap that “lit him up like a Roman candle.” (Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)

In his second at-bat, Morton’s curve started middle-middle and by the time it broke hard inside, he was too late to recognize the danger.

“A lot of the curveballs I’ve seen, you can see them kind of pop out of the hand right away,’’ Wisely said. “But his, it looks like a fastball until it just drops off. I mean, he’s been playing this game for so long. He’s kind of mastered the tunneling process. So every time he throws it, you won’t see the spin on it until late, and it gets to you.”

Does Morton remember the first guy he ever hit in the majors?

“No,’’ he said quickly.

It happened in your major-league debut and …

“Casey Kotchman,’’ he said as the lightbulb went on.

“And I know that because I played with Casey that summer,’’ Morton continued. “He got traded for Mark Teixeira. I don’t remember what pitch it was. May have been the heater? I just know I apologized.”

This was June 14, 2008, at Angel Stadium when Morton was a rookie for the Braves. With two out and a runner on second in the sixth inning, he hit Kotchman on the first pitch.

“Obviously, he yanked something and it was not on purpose,’’ Kotchman, 41, said by phone. “That’s not something that you’re doing in your debut. I thought Charlie was great. It’s great to see that he’s lasted so long and has had a really, really great career.”

Little did anyone know that Kotchman was the start of something big and painful. Morton went on to hit six MVPs: Albert Pujols, Christian Yelich, Paul Goldschmidt, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Ronald Acuña Jr.

He’s also hit five World Series MVPs: David Eckstein, David Freese, Pablo Sandoval, George Springer and Jorge Soler.

Along the way, his feats included becoming the first pitcher with four hit batters, four walks and four strikeouts in a game since Tom Hughes of the Washington Senators did it on April 18, 1913.

But Morton had his share of cringe-worthy moments, too. The Sultan of Sting still can’t believe he’s hit three fellow pitchers, Ted Lilly, Kyle Lohse and one that hurts him most of all.

“I respected the heck out of Tim Hudson. I was a big fan,’’ Morton said. “I hit him with this sinker kind of down and in, right in the knee. And I just remember being so embarrassed. Because I’m not trying to hit Tim Hudson!”

About the only thing Morton has yet to experience on the HBP checklist is being on the receiving end. He had 62 career plate appearances before the adoption of the universal designated hitter whisked him from harm’s way for good.

There’s no guarantee that Morton will keep pitching beyond this season. Until then, just know that if he were to drill your favorite player in the leg, there would be no hard feelings.

“I’m not putting a bunch of guys at risk physically,’’ Morton said. “I still feel bad about it, because I’d much rather throw that ball in a good spot where I can get you out. And I feel bad about it that you’re in pain because of something I did that didn’t even have to happen.

“But at the same time, know that I’m not trying to do that — for myriad reasons.”

Hey, sometimes you win, sometimes you bruise.

— The Athletic’s Will Sammon contributed to this story.

(Top photo of Charlie Morton: Rich von Biberstein / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)