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Chris Sale's 'Stuff' is Back at Just the Right Time
The Atlanta Braves have to be happy that they went out and got Chris Sale this offseason
The offseason acquisition of Chris Sale by the Atlanta Braves was seen by many across Major League Baseball as not consequential for the 2024 season.
After all, Sale's struggled with health ever since joining the Boston Red Sox, pitching a combined 151 innings since his injury-shortened 2019 season. 102.2 of them came last season, where Sale put up the second-worst ERA of his career (4.30) in his age 34 season around multiple injured list stints.
But Sale told us after the trade that he was not only fully healthy for the first time since that he entered that 2019 season, but that it allowed him to have his first normal offseason since 2018, when he led the Boston Red Sox to a World Series championship and put up his 7th consecutive Cy Young finish, coming in 4th.
And the numbers bear that claim of health out, both in the results and the metrics.
Sale's made two starts for the Braves, going 1-0 with a 3.38 ERA. He's pitched 5.1 innings in both outings, allowing a combined four runs on nine hits and striking out thirteen. Sale's walked only two batters all season and allowed only one home run, which came on the second pitch of his season.
But the underlying metrics for his pitches are also better, both in just velocity and pitch movement/effectiveness.
Chris Sale's fastball averaged only 93.9 mph last season, a far cry from his "last healthy season" mark of 95.2 in 2018. Well, through two starts in 2024, it's sitting at 94.8 mph, significantly closer to his old form from the mid 2010s.
And that's a fastball that's not always been there in recent years for Sale - last season, Sale significantly shifted late in the year to throwing his slider a lot more and de-emphasizing the fastball, for survival reasons.
Chris Sale adjusted his pitch mix to avoid overusing the fastball late in 2023
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Seeing that he was able to not only reach back and get velocity when he needed it, but also trusted the pitch is a good sign.
And Sale had so much trust in the fastball that he actually throwing it more this season, taking away from his changeup to do it. The changeup, used 16% of the time last season, is down to 8% usage so far in 2024. This is a theory of Strider's - why throw your third-best pitch more when you can instead throw your best or second-best pitch instead? And Sale's been really selective so far this season with when to throw the changeup, preferring to use it in two-strike counts but not so much earlier in the at-bat.
Additionally, Sale's adjusted his locations on the fastball to maximize its effectiveness, although I don't know if this is more intentional or "he's healthy enough to actually hit his spot". The heatmap for 2023 features a lot of middle-and-up last season, pretty evenly distributed across the strike zone. This season, it's been a lot of to the arm-side, up-and-away from righties. That's the right place to leave it, in my opinion, as it's a pitch that has a lot of horizontal movement and so it's not spending very much time in the strike zone.
As for the slider...well, let's just say the movement is much better than last season, with the pitch going from below average horizontal movement (-1% over average) in 2023 to above-average this season (+9% over average).
Ask Diamondbacks second baseman Ketel Marte how good that slider is:
Per our friend and Marquee Network analyst Lance Brozdowski, Driveline's Stuff+ model results in a 113 Stuff+ score (above-average) for the fastball and a 129 Stuff+ (plus) on the slider.
All of this adds up to a resurgence for the 35-year-old Sale, who is going to be needed more now that Spencer Strider's (likely) done for the year. And so far, it looks like he's going to be up to the task.