Chris Sale couldn’t pitch in the Atlanta Braves’ regular-season finale, but he still led the National League this summer.
The Braves ace won the pitching Triple Crown in the NL and led the league in wins, ERA and strikeouts. Sale finishes the season with 18 wins, a 2.38 ERA and 225 strikeouts.
That makes this only the second time in the past century that pitchers have won the Triple Crown in both leagues in the same season. Detroit Tigers’ pitcher Tarik Skubal completed the Triple Crown in the American League on Sunday. The last time this happened was in 2011, when Clayton Kershaw (NL) and Justin Verlander (AL) each took home the award. Before that, the last time there were double Triple Crown winners was in 1924.
Their performance should again determine the voting for the Cy Young Award this year, as no pitcher has ever managed to win the Cy Young after winning the Triple Crown.
Sale was scheduled to pitch in the second game of a rescheduled doubleheader against the New York Mets on Monday, but he was scratched in the last second due to back spasms – which reportedly first affected him on Sunday night. After winning the second game of the doubleheader without Sale to reach the playoffs, the Braves announced that their ace would miss the entire wild card series against the San Diego Padres due to the injury.
Although Sale and Skubal profile themselves quite similarly as funky lefties with enough speed to overpower hitters, they took very different paths to the Triple Crown.
Chris Sale had a career year at age 35
Selling out wasn’t exactly a recovery product for the Braves, but you would have been hard-pressed to find an objective observer who didn’t think he was past his prime.
The 35-year-old was one of the best pitchers in baseball from 2012 to 2018, a period that culminated in a World Series title with the Boston Red Sox. The cracks started to show in 2019, when Sale posted a career-worst 4.40 ERA and missed the final month and a half of the season due to elbow inflammation.
Tommy John surgery followed in 2020. Sale returned in 2021 and made just nine starts. He then made just two starts in a 2022 season that can only be described as “cursed.” Sale missed time due to a rib fracture in preseason, then a broken finger, then a broken wrist. The latter happened in a bicycle accident.
The 2023 season was relatively better for Sale, posting a 4.30 ERA in 20 starts, but that didn’t change the perception that his best days were behind him. Still, the Braves opted to buy low, sending Vaughn Grissom, a young but airy middle infielder, to Boston in exchange for Sale, plus $17 million in cash to cover his remaining salary.
And now this.
What has changed for Sales? In addition to a 1-mph increase across his arsenal, Sale threw his slider a career-high 40.3% of the time, according to Baseball Savant, at the expense of his four-seam fastball. Hitters had a harder time squaring him, with declines across the board in his meaningful batted-ball stats.
But most of all, Sale stayed healthy until the final day of the regular season, something that seemed unlikely considering his age and the fact that he had some of the most violent mechanics in baseball. The result will be his first career Cy Young Award, something that eluded him during his dominant days in the American League.
