This story was excerpted from Mark Bowman’s Braves Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
ATLANTA -- When Chris Sale threw two of his hardest pitches since 2018 and dominated the Dodgers while constructing a shutout in sweep-clinching win over the two-time defending World Series champs on Thursday, we gained more reason to discuss how this season ranks against some of the other great ones of his Hall of Fame career.
“He's throwing harder than he ever has at 37 years old, and you can make an argument as great a career as he's having, he's as good now as he's ever been,” Braves manager Walt Weiss said. “It’s just mind-boggling.”
Remember when Sale’s career was dead, when injuries limited him to a total of 151 innings from 2020-23? That’s when the Red Sox gifted him and $17 million to the Braves during the 2023 holiday season. All he’s done since then is post a 2.33 ERA over 74 appearances (73 starts) for Atlanta.
The relief appearance was made to allow Charlie Morton to make one last start last year. Great pitcher and an even better dude. This also applies to Morton, but we’re here to focus on what the current Braves hurler is doing this year.
Sale scattered five hits and tallied 11 strikeouts while going the distance on Thursday. He became the first pitcher 37 or older to tally 11-plus strikeouts in a shutout since R.A. Dickey did it for the Mets on June 18, 2012. One difference between these two starts is that Dickey’s knuckleball didn’t make the radar gun sing like it did for Sale.
When Sale struck out Shohei Ohtani in the third, he hit 100-plus mph (no rounding up) for just the 15th time in his career. Eight of those pitches were thrown when he was a 21-year-old rookie. Six more were thrown in 2018. And of course, the latest was unleashed at 37 years old.
Sale also blew Ohtani away with a 99.6 mph pitch during a fifth-inning strikeout. The 2024 NL Cy Young Award winner has thrown a pitch this hard 21 times since the start of 2018. The only two that have been unleashed at this speed since the start of 2019 were thrown to the four-time MVP on Thursday.
“[Ohtani’s] doing stuff no one's ever seen,” Sale said. “He's probably the best I've ever seen. When you're facing the best, you’ve got to bring the best.”
Now back to whether this might be the best season of Sale’s career. He’s certainly not going to throw 200-plus innings like he did in 2013 and 2015-17. So, previous strikeout totals, like 308 in 2017 and 274 in 2015, will dwarf this year’s mark. But we can still compare rates and other metrics.
ERA
Sale ranks second in the Majors with 2.06 ERA. This would be the best ERA he has ever produced as a starter, trumping the 2.11 ERA he posted over 27 starts in 2018.
ERA+
This metric accounts for whether a pitcher has a hitter-friendly ballpark and league averages for that specific season.
Sale’s 203 ERA+ is trumped only by the 209 he produced in 2018. His next best marks were 174, produced during his Cy Young Award season two years ago and 173 in 2014.
His current ERA+ means he has been 103 percent better than the average pitcher this season.
Strikeouts
Sale ranks seventh among MLB pitchers with 177 strikeouts. As mentioned above, he’s not going to flirt with any of his career-high totals. Assuming he has four starts remaining, there’s a chance he becomes just the ninth pitcher to record at least nine 200-strikeout seasons. The only current lefty in this group is Sale’s childhood idol Randy Johnson.
Strikeout rate
Sale’s 30.7 percent strikeout rate is down from the 32.4 (2025) and 32.1 (2024) marks he produced the past two seasons. But this is the fourth best rate ever recorded by a pitcher at 37 or older.
The only better marks were posted by Johnson (37.4 percent in 2001 and 32.3 percent in 2002) and Nolan Ryan (30.9 in 1987).
Whether or not this has been Sale’s greatest season is debatable. But the further it’s progressed, the harder it is to argue against the expectation he’ll one day be enshrined with Johnson and Ryan in Cooperstown.