Braves’ Chris Sale is healthy and showing the performance of an elite ace

Even the most passionate baseball fan can fall into the trap of not realizing how good Chris Sale once was. When asked about the best pitchers of the last 15-20 years, the names that often come up are Kershaw, Verlander, Scherzer, deGrom, Greinke and Sabathia. It can be argued that on an innings basis and from a top-tier player’s perspective, Sale is equal to any of them, with the possible exception of the Dodgers’ left-hander.

From a career value perspective, it’s a little trickier. Jacob deGrom has the same problems, on an even bigger scale. Sale has just 130 career wins and 1867 1/3 innings pitched, far fewer than many of his peers. But you can’t argue with those career ERA and FIP numbers of 72 and 70, respectively.

In addition to the batted-ball-based metrics I use in this field to measure the performance level of current outfielders and pitchers, I also use some unique quantitative methods to measure historical performance in the modern era of the game all the way back to 1901.

In an attempt to determine the most dominant pitchers of all time, I ranked the starting pitchers with the largest combined standard deviations above league average in K/BB ratio and K rate. One major qualifying factor has been a barrier for many pitchers of the modern era: you have to pitch 162 innings to qualify for the ERA title in a season. Although the number of qualifiers has steadily declined in recent years, I decided to keep that requirement—it just wouldn’t be fair to pitchers of previous eras to do away with it.

So my list of the 40 most dominant starters on both a career and three-year peak basis doesn’t include many active pitchers. Scherzer is No. 15, Kershaw No. 37 and Verlander No. 39 on my career values ​​list, with Scherzer (No. 26) and Kershaw (No. 29) also on the peak values ​​list. (Verlander is not on the peak values ​​list.)

Oh, and Chris Sale is the highest-ranked active pitcher on the Peak list at No. 24. From 2015 to 2017, he was 7.41 standard deviations above the league average K/BB ratio and 5.79 above the league average K rate. He was a historically great pitcher coming out of that phase, and he was only 28 years old.

At the end of each season, I write a companion piece to my updated top 40 lists. At the end of the 2017 season, I wrote that Sale was “just one strong season away from appearing on the career list.”

Well, that one strong season is still away from him. (Interestingly, Kershaw has only qualified for one ERA title since 2017 and barely improved his position on those lists.) Sale came close, but has never qualified for the ERA title since. I don’t mean to bring him bad luck, but Sale has been healthy and as dominant as ever in 2024, posting a 10-2, 2.91 record and an excellent 107/16 K/BB ratio.

At his best, Sale performed at an elite level in all three basic principles of pitching — missing bats, minimizing walks and managing contact. During his injury-plagued Boston years, his excellent contact management skills gradually faded, although he was as good as ever on the K/BB front.

At his peak in 2015-17, Sale was less of a grounder generator than he is today. His 49.0% grounder rate in 2024 is a career high. Conversely, he had fairly high pop-up rates during his time with the White Sox. His 1.9% pop-up rate this season is by far a career low.

His 31.4% K rate in 2024 is certainly great, but he has already surpassed it several times in his career. However, his current 4.7% BB rate is a career best.

So, overall, the 35-year-old version of Sale has a K-BB distribution that is great, if not historically great, but it has become a prolific grounder generator, a trait that ages more gracefully than a pop-up tendency.

How’s his contact authority management? His overall average exit velocity of 85.0 this season is just slightly below his career best (84.7 mph in 2018). His average flyball exit velocity of 88.1 mph is also second best behind 2018, and his average grounder exit velocity of 80.1 mph is his best ever.

Each year, I award pitch grades to starters who have pitched over 135 innings. I lowered that threshold after Sales’ peak of 162 innings, so his last recorded pitch grades were in 2017. Like most truly great pitchers, he built his 2017 repertoire around an elite fastball — his four-seamer earned an “A+” grade, with an Adjusted Contact Score of 109 and a whiff rate of 14.7%. He surrounded it with three “B+” offerings, his slider (72, 16.2%), changeup (85, 18.2%), and sinker (97, 7.3%).

As you might expect, Sale does things a little differently seven years later. He now throws his slider over 40% of the time, and it has become his clear-out pitch. Today, it would get an A++ grade (57 Adjusted Contact Score, 22.2% whiff rate). It’s one of the deadliest throws in the game.

His little-used sinker is an “A” pitch (73, 5.4%), while his changeup (69, 11.7%) and four-seamer (142, 11.2%) are just average “B” pitches. When hitters do a lot of damage against Sale, it’s always against his four-seamer – he’s allowed seven fly balls over 105 mph this season, five of them against his heater.

He’s been as good as his numbers this season – he’s posted an Adjusted Contact Score of 83, which puts him not far behind the frontrunners in the race for Contact Manager of the Year. His Tru Production Rating of 57 is even better than his ERA of 71 and FIP of 60.

Can he keep it up? For the rest of the season, sure, if he can avoid the freak injuries that have marked his recent past. Such a heavy reliance on the slider for his success doesn’t bode well for the future. The dominance of the fastball is always there — Patrick Corbin and Shane Bieber had brief periods where their elite sliders carried their run-of-the-mill fastballs. The same goes for Barry Zito and his curve. If Sale can contain the damage done to his four-seamer, he’ll still have a high enough whiff rate to be an elite pitcher. That’s just an “if,” though.

Let’s hope Sale stays healthy enough to make a run at that very nice and long overdue first Cy Young Award. (He has seven top-six finishes.) I don’t necessarily see 2024 as the start of a new career high, but in his first year in Atlanta, when the club needed him to lead them through the firestorms, he was as good as his numbers, or even better.