Chris Sale: fragile but still magical

The Braves might have obtained the best rate-basis arm available this offseason.

Let me start by telling you what this post will not be about. These things are relevant generally, just not to what I'm doing here.

• Chris Sale's injury history. Yes, I know, keep him away from this post because there's a 15% chance he'll strain his eyelids reading it and miss 3 months, blah blah blah. His injury history is long and bizarre. Your injury concerns are valid, but the only people who can assess it better than "well he sure has gotten hurt a lot" are the people who just did his physical for the Braves and decided he was worth the risk.

• Chris Sale's long track record of good performance. You've read about it, you've watched it, there's nothing more I can say about it. Chris Sale was one of the very best pitchers in the game for a few years. Seven-time All-Star, closed out a World Series, did all sorts of Spencer Strider-type things.

• Chris Sale's personality. Again, the people best positioned to assess Chris Sale's clubhouse fit work for the Braves. I do not. He seems psychotic in a potentially fun way, and I'll leave it at that.

So what will I tell you about? I'll tell you about the kind of pitcher that 34-year-old Chris Sale was in 2023. And hopefully, in doing so, I'll be telling you about the kind of pitcher that 35-year-old Chris Sale will be for the Braves in 2024 - and, if they so choose, in 2025. If you've read my posts before, you know that I won't be using ERA, pitcher wins, or WHIP to paint the picture. Those metrics are generally awful for evaluation and they're even worse when your team has one of the worst defenses in modern history (look up Kiké Hernandez's fWAR total this year for a good laugh). Instead, we're going to look at Statcast metrics. So enjoy the ride, and maybe you'll learn something a bit new about an advanced stat along the way!

1. Chris Sale was one of the 20 best starting pitchers in baseball on a per-pitch basis last year.

(If you already know what xwOBA is, you can skip this paragraph.) In recent years, fans have gotten access to amazing batted-ball data, allowing us to learn the launch angle, exit velocity, and expected batting average of every ball in play. A stat called Expected Weighted On Base Average (xwOBA) takes everything a player does - strikeouts, walks, batted balls - and using the expected BA and SLG of each batted ball, comes up with one bottom-line number to describe the player's performance. For a sense of scale, .320 is average, Nicky Lopez hit to a .288 xwOBA (extremely bad), and Ronald Acuña Jr. hit to a .463 xwOBA (absurdly good).

So here's a leaderboard of starting pitchers with xwOBA allowed last year (min. 1000 pitches)

This is basically a who's who of great pitchers across baseball last year, plus some guys whose names you will learn very soon (Skubal and Ragans in particular) if you haven't yet. Sale isn't quite up there with Fried and Strider, but he's comfortably in the conversation with Gerrit Cole, Tyler Glasnow, and Joe Ryan. So who are the next 20?

That's right. On a per-pitch basis, Sale was better than Eury Pérez, Aaron Nola, Logan Webb, Sonny Gray, Blake Snell, Luis Castillo, and . . . Shohei Ohtani.

So you might wonder, "Well, Sale's full-season numbers look really good, but how much is that stellar .293 xwOBA skewed by a strong start that Sale couldn't maintain when he came back from his shoulder injury, you handsome devil?" Thank you for asking. Sale's xwOBA after injury was worse than his full-season xwOBA ... by .003. Over the last two months of the season, Sale was merely the 29th best starting pitcher in baseball (min 500 pitches).

So here's the Braves' 2024 rotation by 2023 full-season xwOBA:

• Max Fried (.258, #2)

• Spencer Strider (.273, #6)

• Chris Sale (.293, #20)

• Charlie Morton (.330, #100)

• Bryce Elder (.328, #96)

Particularly when you consider that the alternatives were way more expensive ($70M for #26 Sonny Gray or #51 Eduardo Rodriguez, large prospect capital for #56 Dylan Cease), you can see why the Braves find Sale so tantalizing even at his age. You can also see why Sale isn't just neatly interchangeable with Charlie Morton as a "grizzled veteran presence" type; he's still got some ace in him.

2. Chris Sale's fastball is still pretty good, but it's elite when he can throw it hard.

Sale's velo was all over the place last year, and it dipped particularly after he returned from injury.

Let's start by looking at the full-season picture. Among SPs who threw at least 100 fastballs, Sale's was 35th in xwOBA (.323). Note that league-wide xwOBAs against fastballs are higher than against offspeed and breaking pitches; only 14 pitchers (including Max Fried) had a sub-.300 xwOBA fastball, and even Spencer Strider had a human .317 xwOBA against on his heater.

So that's a good fastball. Let's look at a leaderboard again.

In the same neighborhood as Strider and Nola, slightly better than Burnes and Miller, as well as Glasnow, Gallen, and Cease (not pictured, ranked too low, haha suck it losers).

But how about on days when Sale has 95mph heat (just a tick above what he averaged last year) or better? Obviously, it's not fair to compare his good stuff to everyone else's average stuff, so let's just restrict our search to pitchers who threw at least 100 95+ mph fastballs last year.

Hoooooo buddy. As you can see, for some of these pitchers, throwing a 95+ mph fastball is a way of life (that was 44.7% of Zack Wheeler's total pitches last year) and for others, it's a once-in-a-lifetime treat (Seth Lugo, Jack Flaherty, Max Scherzer). Sale is somewhere in between, with about 15% of his total pitches fitting that category. Now, I think it's fair to have some concern about Sale's velo drop after coming back from injury - he only threw 45 pitches at 95+ mph from August through the end of the season. And Sale's fastball was significantly less effective as a result; he allowed a .351 xwOBA against it after returning from injury.

3. But Sale is still probably really good with diminished velocity.

So if Sale's fastball wasn't very good after injury, how did he post a basically identical xwOBA post-injury as pre-injury - with a higher K rate to boot? Well, check this out.

This is Chris Sale pre-injury.

This is Chris Sale post-injury. He recognizes his 4SFB isn't as effective as it was before, so he boosts his slider and changeup use and ... still dominates.

So maybe with a full offseason of distance from his shoulder fracture (not to be confused with the shoulder strains/tears that Soroka and Wright have dealt with), Sale's fastball is back to early 2023 form and he can use it as his primary weapon again. But if it's not, his post-injury outings create a blueprint for how Sale can still be damn good.

**Also, I'll add that in past years, Sale was actually more effective with a sub-95mph fastball than he was in 2023, so there might be reason to think that even if he is dealing with a prolonged velo drop moving forward, he'll be more effective at a lower velo than he was this year.**

4. In conclusion, if I had to start any pitcher available this offseason in a game tomorrow and my life depended on it, I might take Chris Sale.

This isn't an exaggeration, and I hope if you've made this far, you understand why. On a per-pitch basis, 2023 Chris Sale - injured, old, washed, whatever - was better than Shohei Ohtani, Blake Snell, Dylan Cease, Sonny Gray, Logan Gilbert, Luis Castillo, Jordan Montgomery, Shane Bieber, and basically everyone else who isn't jealously guarded by their team. The only other guy in the conversation would be Tyler Glasnow (who was .001 xwOBA better), or maybe Yamamoto if you're convinced that he will immediately be a true #1 starter. He ended the season healthy and dominant.

Getting Sale to October healthy is a huge task for all the reasons I haven't gone into because everyone knows about them. But that's why the Braves got two extremely inexpensive years of him for one good prospect with no apparent future in Atlanta. And with the depth of the bullpen, the availability of Quad-A starters and prospects to eat midsummer innings, these Braves are built to have a real chance to run a Strider-Fried-Sale rotation in the playoffs.

And that would be absurd.