Braves Extend Chris Sale Through 2027 Season

Well, Chris Sale no longer has to do what he does under the cloud of a one-year contract. On Tuesday, the Braves announced they’d signed their soon-to-be 37-year-old ace to a one-year contract extension with a team option for 2028. The deal represents a huge raise. Sale is making $18 million this year – the team option year at the end of the two-year extension he signed back in 2024 – and the new extension will pay him $27 million in 2027. If the Braves pick up the 2028 option, they’ll pay him $30 million. No word of a buyout for that final year has been reported, and the announcement included no mention of a 1% donation to the Atlanta Braves Foundation.

Even though the Braves are not getting the kind of discount you associate with a contract extension, this seems like a no-brainer for them. Yes, they’re paying ace prices for the age-37 (and possibly age-38) season of a pitcher whose injury history includes a Tommy John surgery and five variations on the word “fracture.” But Sale really is an ace, and his performance has showed no signs of dropping off. Since he arrived in Atlanta in 2024 (and for the sake of Red Sox fans, I won’t mention how he got there), Sale has a 25-8 record with a 2.46 ERA and 2.33 FIP. He’s struck out nearly a third of the batters he’s faced, and he won the Cy Young award in his first season with the team. In 2025, his four-seamer averaged 94.8 mph. That’s above average, especially for a left-handed starter, and especially for someone with a funky sidearm delivery, and especially when you factor in the bump in effective velocity due to the above-average extension from his 6-foot-6 frame. That’s a lot of especiallys making Sale’s velocity play up, and it’s reassuring to know that it has looked pretty stable in recent years.

Sale’s slider is just as important as the fastball. He throws it nearly half the time, pounding the bottom of the zone against righties and spotting it down and away against lefties. (That last part is a change; until 2025, Sale would locate the slider at the very bottom of the zone against all batters, but last year, he started focusing on the outside corner to lefties.) It’s certainly working. According to Statcast’s run values, Sale’s slider has been the most valuable pitch in baseball over the past two years, worth 47 runs. No other pitch has been worth more than 40.

It’s as early as it gets, but Sale’s age-37 season is shaping up pretty well. On Sunday, he made his first spring training start, striking out three over two scoreless innings. His fastball averaged 95.1 mph. Sale will get old and slow down someday. Everybody does, and for all we know it could happen this year, but I think it’s fair to say that right now, the only indication that it’s coming is the age column on his player page.

Now let’s get into the bad stuff. I only gave you numbers about the past two seasons for a reason. Sale has suffered a litany of injuries over his career, and for a while there, it looked like they might even knock him out completely. He missed the 2020 season due to Tommy John surgery, and his recovery, combined with a broken pinky and a stress fracture in his ribcage, limited him to just 11 starts in 2021 and 2022. That’s 11 starts over three years. Sale wasn’t himself when he returned in 2023, and he missed more than two months with a stress fracture in his scapula. Despite regaining his dominant form in 2024, he missed another couple months with a fractured ribcage after diving for a ball in 2025.

Injuries and age are the main reasons the extension makes lots of sense from Sale’s point of view, too. Pitchers get hurt all the time, and he’s no exception. It’s hard to imagine even a player as dominant as Sale has been getting a three-year contract that runs through his age-40 season, let alone one that gives him a top-15 salary among starters. If he misses significant time in 2026, the Braves may well decide not to pick up that team option. But – and please give me some credit for finding a way to avoid this phrase for the first 700 words of this article – when healthy, Sale is starting to look like one of those pitchers we shouldn’t count out until we see signs of real decline with our own eyes.

I would also add that despite the injuries, you can at least make the argument that Sale is a reasonably durable pitcher by today’s standards. Since his first season as a full-time starter in 2012, he has averaged just over 142 innings pitched per season. Over the last three seasons, he has averaged 135 1/3 innings pitched. He’s a top-60 pitcher in terms of innings pitched both over the past two years and over the past three years. If you were a GM, how much would you pay for a guaranteed 135 innings from Chris Sale?

By just about any metric, Sale has been a top-five pitcher over the past two years. But it goes way beyond that. His 10.0 WAR over the past two seasons ranks 16th highest among all pitchers in their age-35 and -36 seasons, ever. Nearly everybody ahead of him is in the Hall of Fame (or would be if not for steroids, throwing the 1919 World Series, or general insufferability).

I made that table sortable for a reason. We should also note that everybody ahead of Sale on the list threw at least 120 more innings than he did, thanks both to the fractured ribcage and to the era in which he’s pitching. He’s got the lowest FIP on there and the third-lowest ERA. If you look at the top 90 pitchers in terms of WAR in their age-35 and -36 seasons, then rank them by WAR per inning, Sale ranks third, behind Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling. Sale hasn’t just been great; he’s been historically great for a player his age.

I’m finding it impossible not to bring Johnson into this conversation. I know that I shouldn’t. I know that Chris Sale is not Randy Johnson. Johnson was a one of one. Over his entire career, Sale has thrown just 14 pitches at or above 100 mph, and the hardest pitch he threw in his age-36 season was 98.7 mph. Johnson spent almost his entire career in the triple digits, and he touched 96.6 in his age-45 season. Forty-five! Moreover, he did so during a time when velocities were significantly lower. Johnson never even looked like he was trying to throw particularly hard, and he stayed healthy enough to eclipse the 200-inning mark 14 different times. Sale has an effortful crossfire delivery, and injuries have kept him under 200 innings in all but three seasons. Johnson had a career 28% strikeout rate that translated to a K%+ of 176. Sale is up above 30%, but in this age of strikeouts, that leaves his K%+ at 146.

But it’s hard not to think of Sale as something like Randy Johnson Jr. He’s a mere 6’6” rather than Johnson’s 6’10”, but he’s the most dominant left-handed strikeout artist the game has seen since Johnson. He’s overwhelming batters with a similar sidearm, East-West, four-seamer/slider approach. And after negotiating his mid-30s derailment, that approach is holding up as well as Johnson’s did (at least to this point). If nothing else, that should give us hope for the next couple years. Sale is a pitcher, which is to say that even before we consider in his age and injury history, we know that the next pitch he throws could be his last. But he’s following a blueprint that allowed Johnson to pitch at 46 years old, and while it’s unlikely to work for another 10 years, it doesn’t show any signs of failing right now.