Chris Sale Has Hit Another Bump in the Road

While the heavily-favored Yankees deal with the loss of Luis Severino, the Red Sox have a rotation problem of their own, albeit on a significantly smaller scale. On Thursday, interim manager Ron Roenicke told reporters that Chris Sale will begin the year on the injured list. While his delay is related to a bout of pneumonia rather than the elbow injury that curtailed his 2019 season, it’s yet another reminder of the concerns that surround the going-on-31-year-old lefty.

Last year, Sale made just 25 starts, the final one on August 13. He was then shut down due to what was termed elbow inflammation, and while he paid a visit to Dr. James Andrews for a second opinion, he avoided surgery, though he did receive a platelet-rich plasma injection. The headlines at the time were to the tune of “avoids Tommy John surgery,” but there’s never been any indication that Sale’s complaint or his PRP injection were related to his ulnar collateral ligament. His elbow is now said to be fine; he’s been throwing bullpen sessions and is scheduled to throw an extended batting practice session this weekend. However, he’s behind the schedule of his rotation-mates due to back-to-back cases of the flu and pneumonia that he contracted earlier this month. Here’s what Roenicke said, via ESPN:

“With the sickness, it cost him two weeks’ time, and that two weeks is what we’d like to give him to make sure that he’s right,” Roenicke said. “He’s worked hard on getting his arm right, and we didn’t think four starts in spring training was fair to him.

…”Nothing at all with the arm. He’s doing really good with that,” Roenicke said. “We’re really happy with that.”

The delay means that with a backdated stint on the 15-day injured list — remember, for pitchers, the minimum stay has reverted to its pre-2017 level — the earliest that Sale could be activated would be April 7, when the Red Sox host the Rays. His absence leaves Eduardo Rodriguez as the team’s likely Opening Day starter, but as it is, who else joins the rotation besides Nathan Eovaldi and Martín Pérez is an open question, with Chris Mazza a leading contender for the fifth spot but now an additional vacancy, albeit a short-term one.

Missing a couple of starts normally wouldn’t be such a big deal, but even after trading Mookie Betts, the Red Sox do scan as contenders, with a 48.2% chance of making the playoffs by our reckoning. More unsettlingly, Sale is coming off a career-worst year that was bracketed by dreadful numbers at either end:

Admittedly, the calendar makes for rather arbitrary endpoints, but I could have produced even more extreme splits by grouping only his first four starts (8.50 ERA, 6.44 FIP) and then his next 12 (2.44 ERA, 2.11 FIP) or something. If you prefer rolling averages, there’s this:

Sale’s three-inning, seven-run Opening Day start skewed his early-season numbers to the extent that the scale is a bit harder to make out, but the valley in the middle shows his rolling ERA going as low as 2.29, with his FIP as low as 1.83. However you slice it, the point is that he pitched like a perennial Cy Young contender for the middle part of his season, and a palooka at either end, and the bottom line was career worsts in ERA and home run rate — both more than double his 2018 marks — as well as his highest walk rate since 2012. That said, his strikeout rate still ranked second in the majors among pitchers with at least 140 innings, his 29.6% K-BB% fourth, and his 75 FIP- 14th. His 3.6 WAR, despite being his lowest mark since 2011, was more than respectable; 15 teams, including the AL East-winning Yankees, lacked a single starter that valuable.

Still, underlying Sale’s so-so performance are some unsettling signs. Via Statcast, he had the majors’ largest year-to-year drop in average four-seam fastball velocity among pitchers who threw at least 250 four-seamers in both 2018 and ’19:

Sale’s drop is well ahead of the second-ranked Morton, to say nothing of the rest of the field, though it’s worth noting that his velocity has come and gone before. Via Pitch Info, he dropped from 95.6 mph in 2015 to 93.6 in ’16, then rebounded with seasons of 94.9 and 95.7 — and all of those velocities carried him to seasons worth at least 5.0 WAR; he doesn’t need to max out to be effective. Publicly, the Red Sox downplayed concerns about his lower velocity, so maybe his drop had less to do with physical issues than conscious decisions, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

Beyond the lost fastball velocity, Sale showed the second-highest year-to-year increase in exit velocity:

On a percentile basis, Sale’s average exit velocity dropped from the 96th percentile in 2018 to the 45th percentile in ’19, but as with the fastball velo, he’s traveled this road before. In 2016, the year of his previous velocity dip, his average exit velocity of 87.9 mph (up 2.2 mph from the year before) placed him in the 42nd percentile, and yet he remained among the league’s elite pitchers, and improved significantly the next year.

Not all exit velocity is created equal, of course, and for Sale the 2019 gains were not good. His groundball rate fell slightly (from 44.2% to 42.1%), and in a year of record home run rates, he paid the price for those extra fly balls; his 19.5% rate of home runs per fly ball ranked seventh among pitchers with at least 140 innings, and for all of the bats he missed, his xwOBA on contact was a career high .407, placing him in the 15th percentile among pitchers with at least 200 balls in play. Among that same group, his 66-point year-to-year gain was in a virtual tie for seventh:

Perhaps this was all just a blip for Sale, where the combination of his cumulative workload, his shortened post-World Series offseason, and the 2019 rabbit ball turned his 2019 season into a downer, and after an extended break and enough time to ramp up, he’ll be fine. Still, his struggles stand out due to both his exceptional track record and the proximity of his five-year, $145 million extension. In 2017, his first season with the Red Sox, he became the first AL pitcher to notch 300 strikeouts in a season since the turn of the millennium (308, all told ) and led the majors in innings (214.1), FIP (2.45) and WAR (7.6), though he faded somewhat down the stretch and finished second to Corey Kluber in the AL Cy Young voting. It was the sixth consecutive season that Sale received Cy Young consideration as well as All-Star honors. He spent most of 2018 as the frontrunner for the award, starting the All-Star Game for the AL and carrying a 2.04 ERA and 2.08 FIP into late July, but shoulder inflammation limited him to just five starts and 17 total innings in August and September, and he lasted more than four innings in just one of his three postseason starts, though he helped the Red Sox win the World Series. He finished second in the AL in WAR (6.2) and would have ranked second in ERA (2.11) and first in FIP (1.98) had he not fallen four inning short of qualifying.

The Red Sox signed Sale to his big extension last March 22. The deal covers the 2020-24 seasons, with an opt-out after ’22, a club option for ’25, and various escalators and other bells and whistles; a total of $50 million in deferred money lowers its average annual value to $25.6 million, the 10th-highest among active pitchers. The deal already occupies a spot of notoriety. It was a part of Dave Dombrowski’s undoing as president of baseball operations; as Evan Drelich reported, the extension “required a push from Dombrowski to ownership in order to get done, a push that, The Athletic has learned, Dombrowski did not handle smoothly.” Between the extensions of Sale and Xander Bogaerts, and the somewhat surprising decision of J.D. Martinez not to opt out after the season — thus accounting for the three highest AAVs on the team’s payroll — the Red Sox felt hemmed in enough to trade Betts to the Dodgers earlier this month.

Maybe it will all work out for the Red Sox and Sale, but given his rough 2019 and his recent injury woes, it’s doubtful that the team would sign him to the same extension today. For now, the Sox just have to hold their collective breaths and hope that their hefty investment in the wiry lefty pays off, and that his 2020 season is worth the extra wait.