Like any child, Charlie Morton dreamed of being here. He went out to the driveway, basketball in hand, to shoot buzzer-beaters in a championship game that played only in his mind. He pretended to be Mickey Mantle, bases loaded, two outs, the World Series in his hands.

“We all have big dreams, right?” Morton said. “That’s kind of what drove me to play. That’s what drove me to be a baseball player, because I felt like I wanted to be something more than what I was.”

And that’s what still drives Morton to play, even at the end of an 18-year-career. Morton is 41. His children are now of the age to be shooting buzzer-beaters in the driveway or pretending to walk it off in the ninth — although they would probably pretend to be Freddie Freeman, not Mantle.

So why is Morton still doing this? As six bad outings stack on top of each other, the veteran Orioles pitcher was asked if he was still enjoying baseball — if, amid all the head-scratching video review sessions, the long home runs against him and the mounting pressure he does his best to stave off, Morton still enjoyed coming to the yard every day.

The answer, it turned out, wasn’t so simple.

Nothing in life really is.

This is all Morton has known. For 18 years he has pitched in Major League Baseball. Since he was a little kid, this was the goal. That can be a difficult thing to turn away from, even when results aren’t where he wants them to be. Especially when he’s as flummoxed as anyone as to why he’s pitching this poorly now when baseline metrics — the numbers, such as spin rate, showing how well Morton can still break off a curveball, for example — are positive.

When Morton walked into the visiting clubhouse at Comerica Park in Detroit on Sunday morning, one day after appearing in relief rather than as a starter, he was posed with what could’ve been a yes or no question. The response was anything but.

“Why do we do anything?” Morton asked, halfway through a winding answer that redirected itself onto me at one point.

“Why do you do what you do?” Morton asked. “Is it because you have a ton of fun doing it and you’re just happy all the time and you just enjoy every minute of it? And you look forward to waking up every day and going to class to learn how to write and coming and interviewing baseball players all day? I think that’s probably not the only reason you’re doing this.”

Candidly, this is fun. But there’s also a paycheck at the end of the day, which helps my dog eat. Morton didn’t go here, but it’s worth noting anyway: The two-time World Series champion signed for $15 million this offseason. That’s not something to scoff at.

But as Morton unpacked the question, he went back to that little boy in the driveway, the urge to be on the big stage in the big moment. And his mind shot back to a start last year with the Atlanta Braves that almost guaranteed he wasn’t ready to call it a career.

On Aug. 8, 2024, the Milwaukee Brewers scored eight runs off nine hits in 2 2/3 innings against Morton. When Morton walked off the mound two months later for what might’ve been the final start in a long career, that early August outing sat with him.

It stayed with him throughout the winter. It is still with him, even as more poor performances with Baltimore pile up around it.

“I was like, ‘Man, I know I can be better than that. I know I can be better than that physically,’” Morton said. “What it did was, it skewed my perception of my season. It skewed my stats. It skewed everything to a degree where I wasn’t satisfied. I just wasn’t. I walked off the mound the last time — who knows, if I had pitched halfway decent in that game, I don’t know if I’d even be here right now. But I walked off the mound for the last time, and I was like, ‘Man, it just doesn’t feel right. It just doesn’t feel right.’”

So Morton accepted the offer this winter to pitch for the Orioles. What came next is poor viewing: a 10.36 ERA in 24 1/3 innings before a relief appearance Tuesday. Baltimore has lost all seven games in which Morton has pitched, although his 2 1/3 innings out of the bullpen Tuesday were valuable. He allowed one unearned run, and maybe that’s a glimmer of better results to come.

The fact he’s searching for answers in this manner comes as a surprise to him, because for the last decade, Morton has performed at a much higher level than he ever did in his 20s. He still thinks he can right the ship, to make the first six games an aberration rather than a career-ending stumble.

By every measure, Morton has been one of the worst, if not the worst, pitchers in baseball this season. Entering Tuesday, hitters held a .741 slugging percentage against his curveball, which has been a critical offering for Morton over his career.

The “trap” Morton keeps falling into, as he describes it, is a paradoxical one. The baseline metrics of spin rate and shape and velocity are good. On paper, this should work. The results, however, are poor. And he doesn’t know why there’s a disconnect between the two.

“I’m not sure how many people at 41 years old can throw what’s coming out of my hand,” Morton said. “What’s coming out of my hand at 41 years old, if you told me that when I was 25 I would be 92 to 97, spinning the breaking ball the way I am, with my changeup the way it is, I would tell you there’s no way. I’d tell you there’s no way. I don’t know how many dudes, the past 15 or 20 years, have had stuff come out of their hand that well. That’s the trap, though. How good is it? How effective is it? Because on paper, if you had slid over my TrackMan sheet and said, ‘This is where your stuff is at 41,’ I would’ve said, ‘I’m gonna have a pretty good year with that.’ Because that stuff plays. But it’s not.”

It leaves Morton to pore over video and analytics, trying to find some reason for why this is. He thinks there must be a disconnect in timing that alters his release point just enough to where his command is putrid. His 15.9% walk rate entering Tuesday was in the fifth percentile.

“He’s thrown a lot of baseballs in his career, so, we know one year is not like the next, but we also need him to be sort of comfortable in his own skin,” pitching coach Drew French said. “And I know that there’s something that he’s feeling from time to time that he really likes, and I think he’s just trying to recreate that a little bit more often.”

What stood out about Saturday’s performance in Detroit is that it actually was better. He allowed three runs in 3 2/3 innings. He wasn’t the sole reason the Orioles lost that game. But Morton still walked five batters.

French emphasized how the curveball was “more competitive” out of Morton’s hand that day, which could be a good sign. The Orioles seem hell-bent on making this work rather than cutting Morton loose.

“The curveball is just something he has to have,” French said. “I like where it’s at. It’s at least moving north.”

Morton liked how it played, too, but the walks made his appearance “sloppy,” a word Morton said with distaste. He has been far from a sloppy pitcher in his career. Between 2015 and 2024, Morton’s strikeout-to-walk ratio was 3.07 — a good mark. The command issues at play this season are out of character.

“I’m not trying to pitch around guys. I’m not trying to get too fine,” Morton said. At the same time, he recognizes that he hasn’t been overly aggressive, either.

“How many times have I just tried to go middle?” Morton wondered. “That’s where the mentality of the pitching is part of it, because that’s aggression in-zone and going after a hitter.”

Maybe Morton needs to find that aggression — the feeling that he has nothing to lose anymore, so why not go right at a guy? After all, if Morton is going to recover, something has to change. And quickly.

“Right now,” French said, “the conversation with Charlie is, ‘What’s it going to take for you to feel comfortable? What’s it gonna take for you to leverage counts a little bit more often? And what’s it going to take for you to know your curveball is nasty and just trusting it?’”

Morton is not delusional. He knows, at some point, if his results don’t turn around, his career will be over.

He’s felt that way multiple times over the years. In 2010, with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Morton pitched to a 7.57 ERA in 79 2/3 innings. Would he be able to make the adjustments required to warrant his place in the majors? He did.

And in 2015, Morton ended his time in Pittsburgh with a 4.81 ERA. At that point, he couldn’t have known his career would go on for another decade, with his best performances still ahead. Morton became a two-time All-Star in his mid-30s. He won two championships. He earned the right to remain a major leaguer.

“I’ve had seasons where I went out there and I felt like my career was on the line,” Morton said. “I felt like I had more to prove than anyone on the team I was on, and the future of my career in baseball was on the line. That’s not something I was necessarily looking forward to, going back to your original question.

“There have been times I went out for a playoff start and I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to it at all. There were plenty of times I went out and it was — I don’t enjoy that anticipation. I don’t enjoy the uneasiness of that."

That is, Morton doesn’t do this for the adrenaline rush or even the enjoyment. He does it more for the “responsibility,” the weight he feels when 25 other players, a handful of coaches and thousands of fans watch each pitch with hope.

“It’s an opportunity,” Morton said. That’s all he’s ever wanted.

Morton fought for this opportunity since he was a child. He’s not ready to give up on it, even after all these years, even if the game seems harder for him from the outside. Turning away from this game is an unknown that Morton has never faced.

So, after all this, does Morton feel like he’s pitching for his career now?

Again, it wasn’t so simple as a yes or no answer. The circumstances for him have changed.

“When I say my career, I mean literally a career,” Morton said. “Your dreams are crushed and your means of making a living are in jeopardy and the time that you’ve spent is seemingly — not wasted, but wasted in the sense that your talent and your work didn’t create an outcome that you’re OK with or that jeopardizes your well-being. That’s not where I am in my career anymore. Where I am in my career is, the desire to be part of a group and contribute to that group and the challenges that the group is facing, and hope that you walk away not only knowing you gave it your best shot, but that you actually did help.

“I’m not doing that. So, that’s where the question becomes, what do you do to get to that point?”

There were more questions than answers, it seemed, during the 20-minute conversation at Morton’s locker at Comerica Park. The only certainty is that Morton is trying — really, really trying. He’s racking his brain. He’s studying where this has all gone wrong to begin the year. The conversation was existential, yet it all boiled down to one thing.

Morton has done it all during his career. The only thing he’s yet to do is quit.