Chris Sale Finds Another Great Pitch

I’m not sure that we talk about how great Chris Sale is often enough. That’s relatively easily explained, I suppose; after all, with offense down across baseball, there’s more great-looking starting pitchers than ever, and even just within Sale’s division last year we found Corey Kluber, James Shields, Yordano Ventura, Max Scherzer, David Price, Anibal Sanchez, Justin Verlander, and Phil Hughes. You don’t have to go too far to find an interesting starter to talk about these days.

Sale finished third in the AL Cy Young balloting, but a distant third, not picking up a single first-place vote. That was primarily due to an early-season trip to the disabled list that left him unable to match Kluber and Felix Hernandez in innings pitched; otherwise, on a rate basis, he was every bit the equal of the AL’s two best starters. But we know that Sale is incredible, and we know that in 2014 he began to be a different kind of incredible, as Jeff Sullivan noted in June. Sale began to diminish usage of his fearsome slider, the one that he’d collected more than half of his strikeouts in 2012-13 with, in hopes that fewer sliders would help maintain the health of his arm.

That was in June. Now it’s January. We have a full season of data to look back upon, and three things should be pretty immediately clear. One, Sale really did use the slider less over the course of the year as compared to 2013:

sale_pitch-usage_2013-14

Two, as the year went on, the slider was mostly replaced by his fastball, which is an interesting note because in June, when Jeff investigated, it was really the increased use of the change that stood out. Three, the “new ” Sale still had his best season in the big leagues, despite not using his best strikeout pitch nearly as much, despite becoming something much more like a straight fastball/change guy late in the year.

So about that fastball: It’s not a new pitch, really. It’s a fastball. Everyone, just about, has a fastball. But it’s a better fastball. Let’s toss some numbers into a table, focusing just on Sale’s three seasons in the rotation.

Chris Sale, four-seam fastball, 2012-14
K% BB% wOBA HR/FB IFFB% Z-Swing% Z-Contact% Zone% SwStr% Hmov Vmov
2012 15.1 5.9 .341 15.2 22.8 58.8 89.1 59.5 6.5 10.22 6.13
2013 17.3 6.5 .322 12.7 15.2 60.0 88.9 57.7 6.8 11.06 6.23
2014 24.2 7.9 .296 7.3 25.6 64.7 84.8 55.9 8.9 11.37 6.72

I didn’t include his outside-the-zone numbers — spoiler alert, they are very good — in order to focus on what’s happening inside the zone. Though he’s throwing the four-seamer for strikes less often, hitters are swinging at it more often and making contact with it less. It’s not really about getting them to chase on the fastball, it’s about the fact that hitters are able to do less with it, popping up a quarter of the time.

It’s a fastball that’s moving more and differently, and so I would like to draw your attention to the final two columns there. Though Sale is throwing slightly harder, the real difference has come in movement, creeping up a bit each year. Or, if you prefer graphs, here’s his horizontal movement over the last three years:

sale_fastball_movement

In case you’re wondering where article ideas sometimes come from, I was looking at Baseball Prospectus’ PitchF/X leaderboards, where I noted the following truths:

  1. Since 2007, no pitcher (minimum 100 pitches) has a fastball with more horizontal movement
  2. The only other pitcher with horizontal movement even close to Sale’s is Randy Johnson, who was just one of the most slam-dunk Hall of Fame inductees ever (even if these numbers are only capturing late-career Johnson)
  3. This thing moves in a way that other fastballs just don’t.

To quantify that third statement, I subtracted vertical movement from horizontal movement. That produces a number that’s meaningful mainly in that it shows an overwhelming amount of the nearly 300 pitchers included on the list have fastballs that move more vertically than they do horizontally. To pick a name at random, Cole Hamels has 4.69 inches of horizontal movement and 11.68 inches of vertical movement; subtracting vertical from horizontal gets you a difference of  -6.99 inches. That’s the case for 194 of the 293 pitchers, who show more vertical than horizontal, as you’d expect.

Sale not only has one of the very few fastballs that move more horizontally than vertically, but he’s ahead by a considerable margin:

Four-seam fastballs, min. 1000 pitches, 2007-14
Rank Player Count Velo Swing Rate Whiff/Swing HMov VMov H-V
1 Chris Sale 3321 94.25 47.9% 20.0% 10.81 6.17 4.64
2 Randy Johnson 2018 91.28 42.9% 16.2% 10.05 7.77 2.28
3 Zach Miner 1033 90.96 45.9% 10.3% 8.99 6.75 2.24
4 Justin Masterson 5810 93.23 42.3% 13.8% 6.60 4.66 1.94
5 Daniel Hudson 3372 93.81 44.2% 16.4% 8.34 7.18 1.16
293 Jered Weaver 8861 89.73 43.7% 17.4% 0.47 11.85 -11.38

That’s overall, so let’s break it down by individual seasons, and just over Sale’s career. Since 2012, there’s been 353 pitcher seasons with 500 fastballs. Again, overwhelmingly, those fastballs move more vertically than they do horizontally. Unsurprisingly, three Sale seasons easily top the list:

Four-seam fastballs, min. 500, 2012/2013/2014
Rank Year Player Count Velo Swing Rate Whiff/Swing H Mov V Mov H-V
1 2013 Chris Sale 1108 94.43 47.8% 18.9% 10.79 5.72 5.07
2 2014 Chris Sale 1115 94.88 48.3% 23.9% 11.42 6.66 4.76
3 2012 Chris Sale 1098 93.43 47.6% 17.0% 10.2 6.11 4.09
4 2014 Brandon Cumpton 638 93.58 44.0% 8.5% 9.1 5.71 3.39
5 2014 Yohan Flande 508 90.67 36.8% 9.6% 7.86 5.66 2.20

That alone doesn’t make for a great pitcher — oh, hey, Yohan Flande, didn’t see you there — but it’s worth noting. Sale doesn’t just have a fastball that arrives with great velocity and excellent command, as though that wouldn’t be more than enough on its own, he’s got one that moves in a way that hitters just don’t see.

Ultimately, this has just become unfair. Sale has been a starting pitcher for three years. In each year, he’s had a pitch finish among the top six in the American League in pitch values. It’s never been the same pitch. In 2012, his change was the best in the AL, at least by pitch values. In 2013, his slider was his most valuable pitch, coming in at No. 6 in the AL. In 2014, his fastball finished second, and the change was back as third-best.

Used to be, back in his relief days, that Sale was a fastball/slider guy, and that was more than good enough. Then he moved to the rotation and added a change that immediately became a dangerous weapon. Now, he’s throwing the slider less, but still breaking it out in big spots — even in 2014, he went to the slider just over 50% of the time against lefties with two strikes. But rather than suffering because he’s using that slider less in an attempt to preserve his arm, he’s just using the fastball more often, a fastball that’s improved every year, from something that was almost a bit of a weakness in 2012 to a fantastic strength in 2014.

The question about Sale has always been about health, and it will always be about health. Sale was great when he was using a great pitch that wasn’t great for his arm. He was great when using less of that pitch, too. If a great pitcher can still be great and healthy, well, you understand why the White Sox were so anxious to add some win-now pieces this winter. It might not be enough in a tough AL Central, where any team other than Minnesota could conceivably contend. But if you’re in the camp that believes a team really, truly must have an ace in order to win, well, the White Sox certainly have that. Sale isn’t the same ace he was two years ago. He might be a more flexible and durable one now.





Mike Petriello used to write here, and now he does not. Find him at @mike_petriello or MLB.com.

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LeeTro
9 years ago

This type of pitch movement isn’t that unique; it just usually gets labeled as a 2-seamer. The fact that he releases the ball with his hand completely sideways causes the lateral movement on a four-seamer. Change the BP leaderboard to sinkers and you’ll see plenty of pitchers in the 11 H, 7 V movement zone.