World Series 2021 – Braves’ Charlie Morton threw 16 pitches on a broken leg –

HOUSTON — Inside the training room of the visiting clubhouse at Minute Maid Park during Game 1 of the World Series, friends kept dropping by to apologize to Atlanta Braves pitcher Charlie Morton for his misfortune. His response to them, and to others who reached out and wished him well after a comebacker broke his leg during, was the same: “I’m sorry.”

The guy who wore a 102-mph shot off his right fibula in the second inning was sorry. The guy who worked through the pain to face three more batters — and retire all of them — was sorry. The guy who pushed himself so far that his leg quite literally gave out under the stress of his effort was sorry.

“And if that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about Charlie Morton,” Atlanta star Freddie Freeman said, “I’m not sure what does.”

Pain, it’s important to understand, always has been part of Morton’s baseball experience. It’s not something he’d ever wish on anyone else — Morton is legendarily earnest, as his apologies illustrate — but he’s here now, still playing baseball at 37 years old, because of what he learned in the first half of his career, when all he seemed to know was what it felt like for his body to betray him. There were injuries big and little, prime years lost and talent stolen, and eventually Morton started to understand that his job entails coming to terms with a barbaric reality: Throwing a baseball for a living necessitates embracing the hurt.

Still, what Morton did Tuesday night went beyond pain tolerance. The tone he set in Atlanta’s 6-2 victory over the Houston Astros was abundantly clear. He wanted to win a championship so badly that he’d pitch until his body no longer let him. He wanted to do it against the team with whom he won a ring in 2017 and for the team to which he returned this year after nearly a decade and a half away.

“He was…