The end’s not here for Charlie Morton, but it is drawing near, and that’s where we’ll start.

Just a few days after his two-year, $30 million contract with the Tampa Bay Rays expires in 2020, Morton will celebrate his 37th birthday. As a hard-throwing starting pitcher in an industry that values youth a bit more each passing year, Morton is an anomaly: The athlete reaching his or her zenith well on the wrong side of 30.

This season, Morton was named an American League All-Star for the second consecutive year, and while win-loss record is far from the best method of evaluation, his 42-15 mark since 2017 compared to 46-71 in the eight preceding seasons sums up his career arc quite nicely.

Imagine, then, reaching the height of your powers only to walk away.

Morton has thought about this a lot, and while he hasn’t made any decisions, he does know he’d be fine to leave a few hundred strikeouts and, probably, a ton of money on the table.

Sure, his mid-career renaissance, forged through significant adjustments and the elusive blessing of good health, made him a World Series champion, a folk hero in multiple markets and a very rich man.

Yet as Morton, an admitted pessimist, reflects on a career that began when the Atlanta Braves drafted him in 2002, he still feels the biggest triumph was in the toil.

“Would it be tough?” he wonders about walking away with plenty in the tank. “I don’t think it would be that tough, because I’ve been able to experience so much in the game. And a lot of the things I feel were the most rewarding came from not being good, or from failing. Some of the more rewarding moments came from overcoming.

“So, it’s like, ‘Now, everything’s going great.’ But I think it’s easier to find triumph coming from a place of failure than coming from a place where things are going your way.”

Tuesday night, he returns to the city where he won it all, starting against the Houston Astros and Justin Verlander, whose August 2017 acquisition by the Astros, Morton recounts, “changed the personality of the team from, ‘We’re really good,’ to, ‘Holy cow, we got Justin Verlander.’”

Holy cow, indeed: The Astros went on to win their first World Series title, with Morton pitching the final four innings of Game 7 at Dodger Stadium. He returns to Minute Maid Park in an unfamiliar role, that of veteran sage for the famously low-budget Rays, who gave him their largest free-agent contract ever in December.

Morton has lived up to the investment, striking out 197 batters in 161 innings, with a 2.85 ERA and 1.06 WHIP. Tuesday, Astros fans will surely fete his return with T-shirts bearing the CFM acronym - Charlie (Expletive) Morton - and a few knowing smirks may pass from pitcher to batter.

It is a night where two chapters will overlap, all of it a far cry from Morton’s headspace less than five years ago.

“I wasn’t really enjoying myself,” he says of an injury-plagued stretch in Pittsburgh that concluded with a volatile 2015 season. “I’m a bit of a pessimist and I can get stuck in that rut.

“But I started to think, at that time, I’ve been in pro ball 13 or 14 years. ‘Man, you’ve been doing this a while. Maybe you should start to enjoy it before it’s over.’”

So Morton took control – of his health, his emotions and, most notably, the hop on his fastball.

'Blow it by some guys'

Charlie Morton, sinkerballer, was an oft miserable fellow, stricken by misfortune of both the health and batted ball variety.

Hip surgeries in 2011 and September 2014 sandwiched Tommy John surgery in 2012, which was almost the least of his concerns.

The left hip was cut open in 2011, to repair a torn labrum, and the right followed in September 2014, as Morton finally relented after pitching through a sports hernia.

The surgeries played a crucial role in the pitcher he’d become.

“I was able to get better extension down the mound, incorporate my lower half a lot more,” he says. “I was in pain, No. 1, and I was short in my stride. The hips play a crucial role in producing torque and force.”

Meanwhile, he was getting nickel-and-dimed on the mound. In six of his seven seasons in Pittsburgh, Morton’s batting average against on balls in play was well above the normal .300 mark – it was a whopping .361 in 17 starts in 2010.

His ERA – 4.39 – and record – 41-62 – as a Pirate reflected it.

“There’d be games where I felt like, Man, I made some good pitches, in the right spot, and I didn’t get the right result,” he says. “That was such a conflicting thing to deal with, as a sinkerballer.

“Looking back, you’re like, 'Man, you could’ve tried some other things. You could’ve tried to blow it by some guys.”

And so began a metamorphosis into Charlie Morton, fireballer.

A process he sums up as “partially intent, partially health, partially fitness” began at the end of his 2015 season. If there’s a well-worn bookmark in his browser, it’s a FanGraphs page detailing his fastball velocities by start that year.

By September, he’d had enough of a season that began with him sitting 88-91 mph on his fastball as he recovered from hip surgery. The low point was a start at Washington in which he recorded two outs and gave up nine runs.

“I was at a pretty frustrating point in my career,” he says. “And in the last three or four games, I was consciously trying to throw harder.”

Can a bar chart look angry? The uptick in average velocity – cresting near 95 mph in his final start - is impossible to miss.

That winter, he joined a group of major league pitchers – current Giants reliever Tony Watson among them - at a training facility in Lakewood Ranch, Fla., near his Bradenton home. Under the direction of Brewers Class AAA strength coach Andrew Emmick, heavy lifting was deemphasized in favor of circuit training.

A trade to Philadelphia gave him a new start. Shedding 15 pounds – down to 6-5, 218 – gave him a new body. But it betrayed him one more time – a debilitating hamstring injury just four starts into his season ended his stint in Philly and clouded his free agent prospects.

The sample size was tiny, but telling: Morton’s average fastball velocity hit 95.4, up from 92.9, and for the first time in his career he struck out more than one batter per inning – 19 in 17 frames.

“When you’re a sinkerballer, you live and die by where the ball is hit,” he says. “Where I am now, I feel like I’m more in control. Fate has less of a part to play in it. Before, it was subjective for me. If I gave up a 75-mph ground ball through a hole, I didn’t do my job, but I also did do my job.

“I don’t feel like that anymore.”

All Morton needed was one team to place a bet on that small sample.

'That's their secret sauce'

The Astros did not hesitate, guaranteeing Morton $14 million over two seasons by mid-November.

In hindsight, Morton was at the middle of a conga line of pitchers invigorated under GM Jeff Luhnow’s army of analysts – from Collin McHugh to Brad Peacock, to bona fide aces like Gerrit Cole and Verlander who only got better in Space City.

The cluster of improvement has inspired plenty of outsider theories, conspiracy (Trevor Bauer) and otherwise, to determine the Astros’ secret sauce that churns out superior arms.

Allow Morton.

“They sit you down in spring training and tell you, ‘We really think you should use this pitch more. We think you’re a really good pitcher, and we think you can be even better, and these are the reasons why,” he says. “You instantly start thinking of yourself differently: ‘Hmm, maybe I am better than I have been. Maybe I could better utilize my stuff or could develop another pitch that would help me out.’ They’re really open to optimizing the tools you have.

“That’s what their secret sauce is. It’s not like they’re putting you in a pod with some magic dust and shutting it for two hours and baking you at 350 degrees. They’re letting you know small things you can do to get incrementally better and help you believe in yourself and your stuff a little bit more than you already do. And that just builds confidence.”

So Morton started throwing his curveball with greater frequency. And elevating his four-seam fastball. And throwing harder and harder as the season went on.

By season’s end, he’d set career bests in strikeouts (163), strikeouts per nine innings (10) and WHIP (1.19). He was the winning pitcher in Game 7 of the ALCS. And when the Astros needed to find 12 more outs in Game 7 of the World Series, manager A.J. Hinch handed the ball to Morton.

He never gave it back, holding the Dodgers to one run in preserving the 5-1 win, leaping into the arms of catcher Brian McCann – who caught his major league debut a decade earlier.

'I'm glad it happened'

Morton will see almost all those faces Tuesday night in Houston, only this time surrounded by Rays teammates leaning heavily on him to keep them in wild card position, with fellow starters Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Yonny Chirinos still on the injured list.

He is the veteran in the room now, quietly revered – “I don’t think anybody can dislike him,” says center fielder Kevin Kiermaier – for his dominance and his diligence.

They’ll have him for at least one more year, as Morton enjoys the 45-minute commute from his Bradenton home to Tropicana Field.

After that? Leaving home – be it to the Trop or another city – may prove too trying when Morton’s four children – the oldest is 6, the youngest turns 1 next month - are growing up and wife Cindy has been his rock for so long.

So, 19 years in the game may be enough – even if Morton finally has the cheat codes. He has no regrets that he earned them the hard way.

“If I could go back in time,” he says, “and tell my younger self one thing, what would I say? I struggle with that – whether it’s a mechanical thing or a mental or an attitude thing. But a lot of it came through experiencing failure in different ways, be it my body failing or me failing to do things I needed to do. Would I want to just take the easy route in that? Or am I glad it happened?

“I would say I’m glad it happened.”