What's wrong with Chris Sale?
Last year's NL Cy Young and Triple Crown winner hasn't been the same caliber of pitcher this season. What's going on?
The Atlanta Braves are, once again, dealing with rotation injuries.
Reynaldo López is on the injured list after arthroscopic shoulder surgery to address inflammation and loose bodies that were bothering him. The Braves added Spencer Strider, today’s originally scheduled starter, to the IL last night due to a hamstring strain that he suffered while playing catch on Monday.
Boy, having a healthy and effective Chris Sale would be really convenient right now.
Last year’s National League Cy Young winner hasn’t been the same caliber of pitcher as he was in his Triple Crown season, a performance that won him the NL Comeback Player of the Year award. After putting up a 2.38 ERA with 225 strikeouts in his 177.2 innings last year, he’s sitting on a 6.17 ERA after five starts.
What’s going on, and how do the Braves fix him? Let’s talk about it.
What’s different for Sale?
First, let’s break down what’s not that different from last season: His strikeout and walk rates. Each is slightly worse, but not significantly so. His strikeout rate has dropped from 32.1% to 29.1%, but that’s still well-above average and a natural amount of variation from year to year.1 The walk rate’s also similar but slightly worse, rising from 5.6% to 6.4%.
His home run rate’s the real outlier, here - he more than doubled last year’s 1.3% mark with a 3.6% home run rate so far in 2025. After giving up just five homers on the four-seamer all of last year, he’s already at two and has allowed four homers in total after just nine last year.2
There’s some bad luck here, too - his expected ERA is just 3.95 and while he’s allowed a .313 batting average against, it’s fueled by a BABIP of .429. Statcast has the xBA for Sale at just .250 this year.
While much has been made at times about his velo, it’s roughly the same as previous seasons. He averaged 94.9 on his four-seam fastball last season, and he’s at 94.2 this year. On the flip side, his sinker is faster than last year, coming in a full mph harder at 95.1.
His locations are slightly different, though - the four-seam fastball and sinker have both gotten worse, with the 4S drifting down towards the heart of the zone and the sinker drifting up slightly past the heart of the zone. Additionally, the changeup is a called strike less often, now coming in just below the zone, but also comes in closer to the middle of the plate versus the corner.
Here’s 2024:
Here’s 2025:
The movement’s a bit different for each pitch, but not in a way that explains this. The four-seamer, for instance, lost an inch and a half of horizontal movement year-over-year, but only three-tenths of an inch of drop. The changeup lost an inch of drop, yet is coming in lower than usual even with less drop. The sinker’s the real victim here - losing 3.3 inches of actual drop and 1.5 of IVB while maintaining the exact same amount of armside movement, an above-average 17.8 inches.
I think I’ve figured out some of it - his mechanics.
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Sale alluded to this on the radio
Sale went in-studio with 680 The Fan on Monday and explained away any sort of health issues, stating that he’s healthy and feels fine.3
He did admit that his mechanics were a bit of a mess at the moment, though. “There’s some points in my delivery - I’m not (a) big delivery guy, but there’s points in my delivery that I’m not hitting early on and certain cues I have to hit and points I need to hit that start from the ground up.”
I admit that I’m not incredibly well-versed in some of the specific mechanical markers of a pitching delivery like hip-shoulder separation, lead-leg blocking, etc for a normal delivery, never mind one as unique as Sale’s.
But I did notice that his arm angle has dropped a bit this season, going from 11° to 7°. As we discussed when breaking down Bryce Elder, an arm angle drop can change the horizontal movement of several pitches. I’d speculate that this, combined with some sort of lower-body mechanical deficiency that’s causing him to not properly harness the entire kinetic chain, is impacting both the movement of several of these pitches as well as his locations.
The good news is that he seems to be aware and that the organization’s working on it. While the Braves aren’t in that upper echelon of pitching factories - look at the sudden improvements Max Fried’s been able to make in just a short time with the New York Yankees - I’m confident that this is fixable.
And just in time, too - losing Spencer Strider so soon after his return means the Braves need Sale more than ever.
Chris Sale had a strikeout rate lower than 29.1% in three seasons where he was an All-Star and a top-six finisher in the Cy Young race: 2012 (24.9%, 6th-place finish), 2013 (26.1%, 5th-place finish), and 2016 (25.7%, 5th-place finish)
The fastballs were Kyle Schwarber and Carlos Correa, while the slider was tagged by Mookie Betts and the changeup by Yandy Díaz. Not the worst collection of guys to take you deep.
I initially speculated on the podcast that I wondered if he was pitching through something minor - back tightness, shoulder soreness, etc
Got through three paragraphs and thought "wonder if it's an arm angle thing" -- sounds like it! Can affect vertical movement, too, so perhaps that's playing a role in the middle-middle FF issues.
Great read!