At the start of the month, Chris Sale had his worst outing of the season. In a year marked with efficiency and far less effort and stress, the Baltimore Orioles lineup neglected to give Sale the easy outs on tapered down fastballs weaker offenses had been handing him, and his attempts to pivot and find his blow away stuff brought mixed results, as he walked a season-high four and eclipsed 100 pitches without getting out of the sixth. He’s gone seven innings or more in every other start this year.
At the time, it looked like the breaking point of Sale’s energy efficient approach. He had learned the lesson that not every bad lineup deserves the effort of a 12-strikeout night and how to keep his best bullets in his gun, but he left himself open for Manny Machado and other high-level right-handed bats to mess up his plan.
Three starts later, there is no trace of a problem here.
Sale has struck out 26.4 percent of opposing hitters over his last 25 innings–not back to his record pace from 2015, but almost exactly Jake Arrieta‘s strikeout rate for the full year, despite facing DHs instead of pitchers. During that jump in K’s he’s allowed four runs, issued a single walk, and stayed efficient enough to go the distance in both of the last two games.
After some early velocity valleys–no doubt with some cold-weather effect playing in–Sale has settled in to a comfortable 93-94 mph average and flashed the ability run it up to 96 mph when he needs to. But the average is the important thing; Sale’s fastball has enough two-seamer action to be a swing-and-miss pitch at 93-94, as evidenced by him blowing away Jose Altuve at that speed in the ninth inning Thursday.
That’s a good adjustment since his slider–almost exclusively a high-70s slurve rather than the low-80s biter he fashioned more in the past–continues to pick up whiffs at a fraction of its previous rates. He’s been using it to grab strikes and back-door hitters, but despite how soft that sounds, efforts to square it up have gotten, if anything, even worse results for the opposition than before.
Thanks to somehow ducking both Texas series, Sale’s troubled outing in Baltimore and his day in the cold early in April vs. Cleveland are his only matchups against offenses who are above league-average in runs per game (though facing someone with a 248 ERA+ possibly plays a role in dragging your early-season runs average down). His current sub-.200 BABIP is also magnitude beyond typical for even a pitcher who is elite at getting weak contact, and clearly points to an area of regression.
Take some more time to parse through, and there are other reasons why Sale is not going to threaten Bob Gibson’s single season ERA record, but after a small stretch of sleepy and confused efforts against a guy just filling up the zone, to buy into the New Sale we needed to see some signs that he can ramp up the intensity when needed.
We’re seeing it, and maybe this is a level he can find throughout the year, and maybe he’ll tire and the low-90s, low strikeout total guy will come back. And maybe there’s more, and the best stuff–sitting 96 mph with life with regularity, low-80s slider with tighter break–is still in his back pocket. The year I began writing on the White Sox was the year Chris Sale’s professional career started, and the biggest lesson I have learned is to assume less: apply less of what I know about typical development tracks to him, assume less about how much previous patterns in his work mean about his future. He’ll make his own path, and I’ll just be thankful that I watched.
Lead Image Credit: Noah K. Murray // USA Today Sports Images