ATLANTA — He’s a Cy Young Award front-runner at a time when many believed such a possibility had passed for Chris Sale. At 35, the lanky left-hander is such a fierce, formidable force that he breathes life into the Atlanta Braves’ lofty postseason ambitions every time he goes to the mound.
“I’m having a blast catching Chris,” veteran Sean Murphy said after Sale struck out nine in seven innings of a 3-0 win Tuesday night against the Colorado Rockies. “I don’t think I’ve ever caught anybody that’s having a season like this. Every time he goes out there, it just feels like he’s going to throw a shutout.
“It makes me very comfortable. He’s a treat for me.”
He’s a treat for all of Braves Country, and probably a thorn in the side of the Boston Red Sox, who traded him to the Braves in December, presumably figuring the last year of his six-year, $160 million contract would go like the previous five injury-plagued seasons had gone.
Well, needless to say, the opposite has happened.
#Braves beat Rockies 3-0, Chris Sale improves his MLB-leading record to 16-3 with seven dominant innings and lowers his ERA to 2.46, best among MLB qualifiers.
— David O’Brien (@DOBrienATL) September 4, 2024
Sale is the major-league leader in ERA (2.46) and strikeouts (206) and has baseball’s best record (16-3). And on Tuesday he became the first lefty with 200 strikeouts in a season for a franchise that’s had many lefty luminaries in its nearly 150 years of existence.
“I appreciate it,” Sale said. “That’s really cool. On the flip side of that, if we do this thing right we’ve got two more months of baseball. Things like that, I appreciate and they’re fun, but that’s more for the offseason to kind of reflect and look back on.”
Sale has produced a simply resounding late-career resurgence for an Atlanta team that needed this in the worst way after losing preseason Cy Young favorite Spencer Strider to elbow surgery just two starts into the season.
“There’s a lot of things he’s doing that are very special in my book,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said of Sale becoming the first Braves lefty with 200 strikeouts, blowing past the likes of Hall of Famers Tom Glavine and Warren Spahn. “If you’re with him every day and you’re watching these games and how he competes, what he’s done for us — it’s a Cy Young season.
“He’s been huge for us, that’s for sure. Especially when Spencer goes down. We needed somebody to step up, and he sure did.”
Sale showed his ultra-competitive side again Tuesday after Ezequiel Tovar led off the Rockies’ sixth inning with a fly ball to the right-field corner that Jorge Soler misplayed into a triple. Sale struck out the next two batters, Nos. 2-3 hitters Brendan Rodgers and Brenton Doyle, before Michael Toglia flied out to strand Tovar at third.
“I think I just run scenarios through my mind and just kind of figure out what needs to be done there,” Sale said. “You’ve got a guy on third base with nobody out, you know you’ve got to punch somebody out.”
Snitker said, “He understands (misplays) are part of the game, and it’s almost like he just takes over. I’ve seen him do it now a lot of times.”
The Red Sox got Vaughn Grissom from the Braves in that Dec. 30 trade for Sale, whose entire 2024 salary, and then some, is covered by $17 million that the Red Sox included in the trade.
Sale has stayed healthy and made 26 starts, and in the past 23 of those he’s 15-2 with a 2.20 ERA. The Braves are 18-5 in those games, and he allowed two earned runs or fewer in 21 of the last 22 starts.
“It’s pretty special just being out there and seeing how dominant he is,” Braves center fielder Michael Harris said. “I think he’s making a good case for Cy Young.”
Sale’s eight 200-strikeout seasons ties the great Steve Carlton for second-most in MLB history among lefties, behind only Hall of Famer Randy Johnson’s 12.
“I think when you get home and the dust has settled, that’s when you start kind of appreciating some of these things and looking back on whatever it is,” Sale said. “I have a job to do, and quite honestly there’s 29 teams that don’t give a damn about any of the strikeouts I’ve had all year. And whoever I’m facing five days from now is coming for me.
“So I don’t want to get lost in looking at something that really just doesn’t matter right now. It’s a shiny coin that you can’t cash in. I do appreciate it, I respect the guys before me that have done this, but I just know I have a lot of work to do, we have a lot of work to do. And there’s really only one goal in playing this game and starting the season, and that’s winning a World Series.”
Braves closer Raisel Iglesias was named NL Reliever of the Month on Tuesday, after a sensational August in which he allowed two hits and no walks in 13 1/3 scoreless innings. But when interviewed, Iglesias was most excited when asked about Sale, and whether Iglesias and teammates got excited about Sale’s starts.
“I mean, he’s excellent,” Iglesias said through an interpreter. “And I feel like the boys — yeah, it’s exciting when he goes out to pitch, just because you know what he’s done this year and you know what an excellent pitcher he is. … You can’t compare him to anybody else right now. He’s been incomparable. So it’s just exciting whenever he takes the mound.”
Sale needed only 156 innings to become the first Braves lefty to reach 200 strikeouts in a season. Glavine had the former franchise lefty record of 192, set in 1991. That was the year Glavine pitched a career-high 246 2/3 innings with nine complete games and won the first of his two Cy Young Awards.
Sale hasn’t won a Cy Young Award, though he finished in the top five in American League Cy Young balloting for six consecutive seasons from 2013 through 2018, after placing sixth in 2012. He was an All-Star in all seven of those seasons, going 99-59 with a 2.91 ERA in that splendid stretch with the Chicago White Sox and Boston Red Sox while averaging 30 starts, 198 innings and 240 strikeouts.
He had his worst season in 2019 while pitching hurt part of the way, going 6-11 with a 4.40 ERA in 25 starts before going on the injured list with elbow inflammation in August and eventually having Tommy John surgery.
That shelved him for the entire abbreviated 2020 season and more than half of the 2021 season, when Sale also missed time on the COVID-19 list in September.
In 2022, a rib-cage stress fracture, fractured pinkie and broken right wrist — three different and unrelated injuries — limited Sale to two starts, and he made 20 starts in 2023 with the Red Sox around a 10-week midseason IL stint for a stress fracture in his scapula.
While Sale had a modest 4.30 ERA in those 20 starts last season, the Braves saw enough in the last 15 of those outings — 3.16 ERA, .197 opponents’ average, 95 strikeouts in 79 2/3 innings — to believe that Sale, in whom they’d expressed interest previously, could give them plenty in both performance and veteran presence, if he were able to stay healthy in 2024. And he went into the offseason healthy.
Alex Anthopoulos, Braves president of baseball operations and general manager, took what he believed to be a reasonable gamble, trading Grissom for Sale on Dec. 30, with the Red Sox agreeing to pay $17 million of the $27.5 million Sale was owed in 2024 in the final season of a six-year $160 million contract.
Less than a week after trading for Sale, the Braves made a strong statement about how much they believed in him by essentially doubling down, signing Sale to a two-year, $38 million extension that superseded the previous contract. The deal also includes an $18 million club option for 2026 with no buyout.
He’s making $16 million this season and $22 million in 2025. He was healthier entering the offseason than he’d been in a long time, and told the Braves as much before signing the extension. Soon, he was making the drive from his home in Venice, Fla., to the team’s spring training ballpark in North Port for bullpen sessions well before pitchers and catchers reported.
He had a terrific spring training and hasn’t looked back, on his way to producing one of the best seasons by a Braves pitcher in many years. Sale, after totaling 151 innings pitched in 31 starts over his final four seasons with the Red Sox, has pitched 160 2/3 innings through 26 starts this season.
As for Grissom, he’s currently in Triple A after spending parts of the season on the IL and batting .148 with one extra-base hit (double) and a .367 OPS in 87 plate appearances (23 games) for Boston.
(Photo of Chris Sale: Brett Davis / USA Today)
