The Red Sox Have Turned Back the Chris Sale Clock

Chris Sale is great! The Red Sox traded for Chris Sale because he is great. He was great when he was coming off his 2016 season, because that season was pretty great. When it came to Chris Sale, there weren’t any real reasons for worry, aside from his simply being a pitcher, and a team can’t not have pitchers.

That all being said, who’s to say Chris Sale was the best he could be? Who’s to say he couldn’t change some things up from what he did in his last year with Chicago? The White Sox and Sale agreed to a tweak: Sale would try to pitch more efficiently. It’s a fine idea, because if it were to work out, the White Sox would get Sale throwing more innings. That’s better than innings going to anyone else. Sale threw more fastballs, and he threw more strikes, and he was great. Lost some strikeouts, but that was the idea.

When the Red Sox got their hands on Sale, they turned back the clock. That’s what the early evidence shows, anyway. The fastballs? They’re there, but in lesser numbers. Chris Sale is back to being almost impossible to predict.

Through two starts, Sale’s allowed two runs, with a whole bushel of swings and misses. He’s a rather unfortunate 0-1, but, good god, I don’t even know why I just cited his record. Ignore his record. Ignore his record. His record! Ignore it! And don’t ignore this:

That’s a pitch-usage plot from Brooks Baseball, going back to when Sale became a big-league starter. Sale throws a changeup, a slider, and two types of fastballs. The fastballs are combined here under the “Hard” classification. With the Red Sox, Sale has thrown 45% fastballs. Last year with the White Sox, he threw 61% fastballs. His lowest fastball rate between two starts in 2016 was 52%. Sale is back to mixing like he used to, and if you look at a deeper breakdown, you can see that this re-adjustment has happened across the board.

Here are various fastball rates, broken down by situation.

Because it’s been just two starts, maybe these aren’t yet clear patterns, but there are big shifts in every scenario. On the first pitch, for example, Sale’s fastball rate has dropped 19 percentage points. With the batter ahead in the count, Sale’s fastball rate has dropped 20 percentage points. That’s a remarkable line in the table, because even in what you’d consider a fastball count, Sale’s been basically 50/50. There’s no good guessing to do here, and there shouldn’t be, because Sale’s whole repertoire is too great.

Let me tell you what I mean by that. Since Sale began starting in 2012, there have been 224 starting pitchers to throw at least 200 innings. I calculated, for everyone, and for every pitch type, pitch-type run values per 200 innings. Here’s how Sale has done with each of his three weapons:

• Fastball: 87th percentile, run value/200
• Slider: 85th percentile
• Changeup: 96th percentile

His fastball has rated better than Justin Verlander‘s. His slider has rated better than Jacob deGrom‘s. His changeup has rated better than Stephen Strasburg’s. While I know that Sale throws two fastballs, and not one, I’m blending them for simplicity. His repertoire consists of three elite pitches, pitches he can move around at will, and when you have a pitcher so blessed, it doesn’t make sense for the pitcher to work so fastball-heavy. The Red Sox have gotten Sale back to a more optimal usage pattern, and while even the sub-optimal version of Sale was good, there’s no reason to settle. The Red Sox have Sale worrying less about quick outs. A funny side effect is that can lead to quick innings.

Just so you know, the fastball is outstanding. Sale moving away from it shouldn’t be taken as a sign that he has less faith in it. Some of the lost velocity from last year has come back, with Sale more frequently airing it out, and you can also see signs of maturity and experience. When Sale’s thrown a first-pitch fastball this year, it’s averaged 92.4 miles per hour. When he’s thrown a two-strike fastball, it’s averaged 95.9. Sale knows how to pick his spots, and as two visual examples, here are clips from Monday’s eighth inning. A first-pitch fastball at 90:

In the same at-bat, a full-count fastball at 96:

Chris Sale throws very good gas, and he knows full well how to use it. He knows where to put it, and he knows how to manipulate it, and that makes him all the more dangerous. Hitters have to cover a greater range of speeds, and that’s precisely how pitchers keep them off balance.

But while Sale has one of the league’s better fastballs, he also has one of the league’s better sliders, and one of the league’s better changeups. Because of that, there’s no excuse for a hitter ever having a good idea of what Sale’s about to throw. Sure, almost all of the time, Sale is most likely to throw some kind of heater. Yet he can stand out there and effectively randomize, and I’m sure the Red Sox have given him a reminder of that. You can understand where the 2016 White Sox were coming from. You can understand why the Red Sox don’t care to repeat the experiment.