I predicted Chris Sale to win the 2016 AL Cy Young. We predicted Chris Sale to win the 2016 AL Cy Young. The White Sox playoff hopes are somewhat leveraged on him performing to that level.
This wasn’t just based on remembering his murderous eight-start stretch from last June, where he posted a 97/9 strikeout-to-walk ratio over 60 innings and held all hitters to a .172/.211/.270 line, and making a “Why not make the whole plane out of the black box?” reasoning. It’s rooted in a collected confidence in a number of factors: he’s healthy, his approach has advanced while his stuff and velocity has remained electric, his defense is somewhat improved, Max Scherzer has left the league, Felix Hernandez has gone through some decline, and nearly all outside of Houston regard him as flat-out more talented than reigning Cy Young winner Dallas Keuchel. Probability would suggest the guy who keeps reigning supreme in advanced metrics and raw strikeout/walk numbers will actually produce the best-pitched season on the field one of these years.
So far, that hasn’t been happening.
Sale has turned in matching seven-inning, three-run outings against unimpressive attacks in Oakland and against the Michael Brantley-deprived Cleveland Indians that were enough to leave your belly full but poisoned enough to leave a bad taste in your mouth.
During the season-opener, Sale couldn’t spot his fastball in the third inning. He split the plate with heaters that Jed Lowrie and Danny Valencia each sprayed for RBI singles, and then cruised for the rest of the way. If Stephen Vogt doesn’t reach base by bouncing a ball off home plate, he doesn’t have to face either one that inning, but he still made bad pitches in key situation where he usually vaporizes hitters.
Bad command moments happen to everyone, and Sale gets attention for stuff and deception over precision, but what’s the excuse for giving up two ringing home runs Saturday? Well, he was just really, really cold.
Part of it is his own fault. Sale went sleeveless for a 1:10 p.m. first pitch in 32-degree weather. It doesn’t seem like he thought it would matter.
“I don’t think I can wear sleeves,” Sale protested to reporters afterward, before rifling through his locker, tugging out his team-issued long-sleeve undershirt and displaying its thinness for everyone to see his point. Sale came off as pretty unconcerned for someone who had just given bombs to Mike Napoli and Yan Gomes, or averaged the lowest fastball velocity in his career, but he cranked it up to 96 mph enough times to convince everyone he was still alive.
“He wasn’t overthrowing,” Robin Ventura said after the game. “Velocity-wise, he could crank it up there when he needed to. The conditions might have had something to do with it. But I thought he threw great. He had a little bit of feel for his changeup and was moving it around.”
But Sale’s battery mate said the lack of ability to feel the ball in the cold closed off entire portions of his game, restricting him to using a slurvy strike-grabbing version of his slider rather than the hard, biting version he uses to rack up strikeouts by the dozen.
“He had a good feel for throwing his slider on the outside part of the plate to right-handers, it was tough for him going down and in,” Alex Avila said.
“For a pitcher with the ball, you need that moisture, you need kind of that tackiness. When it’s dry like this and extremely cold, you have the numbness in your fingers and you just lose feel.”
So perhaps we cannot get a clear glimpse if he’s the best pitcher in the AL when it’s, as Sale put it, “literally freezing out,” but it’s half of what we have to look at, right now it’s half of what we can use to foretell whether this great, historical season is going to happen, and it’s likely unusable noise produced in conditions that will never be replicated.
We think of sample size as necessary to drown out flukishly bad or undeservedly great outings and allowing times for players to settle down to their normal performance level, but it’s also about diluting discrete events in the data stream. Because sometimes the pitcher is battling the flu, sometimes the lighting is bad and he can’t see his catcher’s signs, and sometimes it’s just too darn cold.
Lead Photo Credit: Matt Marton // USA Today Sports Images
He’ll likely end with better numbers, but he is tied for tops in MLB in TWTW with a perfect 1.000 record. Speak of which, it was nice to hear Steve Stone paired with a professional announcer for the first time in years during the second Sale start of the week.