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Preseason Long-Term Forecast (Beyond the 2019 Projections)

Comparable Players (Similarity Index 69)

Rank	Score	Name	Year	Run Average	Trend
1	81	Yu Darvish	2017	4.00
2	81	Ron Guidry	1981	2.91
3	81	David Price	2016	4.15
4	79	Josh Beckett	2010	6.27
5	79	Carlos Carrasco	2017	3.29
6	78	Felix Hernandez	2016	4.46
7	77	Sandy Koufax	1966	2.06
8	76	CC Sabathia	2011	3.30
9	76	Erik Bedard	2009	3.14
10	76	Roger Clemens	1993	4.65

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BP Annual Player Comments

Year		Comment
2019		Due to publishing agreements, the 2019 player comments and team essays are only available in the Baseball Prospectus 2019 book (available in hardcopy, and soon e-book and Kindle).
2018		Want to endear yourself to a tough fan base? Have the type of April Sale did in his inaugural season with the Red Sox. In five April starts composed of 37 2/3 innings, Sale allowed five earned runs, struck out 52 batters and posted a 1.19 ERA. It was the beginning of a dominant campaign from Sale, and an especially absurd first half. Sale became the second Red Sox ever to strike out 300 batters in a season (the first was Pedro, of course), and just the fourth pitcher ever to reach that milestone in his first season with a new team. He posted the second-most PWARP in the majors and second-best DRA among AL starters en route to a second-place AL Cy Young finish. The elephant in the room is that Sale faded down the stretch. His ERA in August and September was north of 4.00, and his first-ever playoff start in the ALDS was a disaster. That shouldn’t diminish what Sale accomplished in the first four months of the season, but it’s fair to wonder if Sale would be best served dialing it back a bit in an effort to hold up for an entire regular season and, the Red Sox hope, a few starts beyond.
2017		In 2015, Sale posted the 11th-best strikeout rate by any starter in history. Last year, that strikeout rate dipped by 2.5 batters per full game, as did his fastball by two mph, and all that really suffered was his FIP and a set of throwbacks. This was intentional: he wanted to work deeper into games and did so, averaging an additional two outs per start. He finished games six times, a career-best, finally resembling a Felix Hernandez-style ace instead of a good and promising left-handed Gumby. He has a team-friendly contract through 2019, which along with Sale's overall greatness is how the White Sox turned him into a big package of Red Sox prospects in December.
2016		If it weren't for Max Scherzer (who got to face pitchers), Sale would have set a record in 2015. He allowed a 75.9-percent contact rate on pitches in the strike zone, a number bested (among starters) only by Scherzer since the dawn of the PITCHf/x Era. That's the kind of pitcher Sale has become: capable of pounding the zone without fear, and still missing bats at a stunning rate. He did give up a bit more power and hard contact than is his custom, but so many batters made no contact at all that it didn't really matter. Oh, and despite the terrifying delivery and the sky-high pitch counts, he made a career-high 31 starts, without incident.
2015		Jameson Taillon, Drew Pomeranz and Matt Harvey were all taken before Sale in the 2010 draft. This isn't the beginning of a "can you believe Sale's been better" comment; it's not unusual for a mid-first rounder to outproduce some guys ahead of him, and Taillon, Pomeranz and Harvey all have plenty of value. But what's fascinating is that all three of those players were considered relatively safe at the time of the draft, and all have broken at some point. Sale, who has a delivery that makes anyone with eyes and an arm cringe, just keeps pitching. Yes, Sale has missed time with shoulder and elbow injuries during his career, but he has avoided the knife to this point and logged 85 starts over the past three years. Maybe the baseball gods take him away some day, but at this point, saying "I told you so" if he does break will look petty. No one thought Sale would last this long. His dominance is beyond question, and he's as good a candidate as any to win the AL Cy Young in 2015. Savor his starts and relish the fact that, for once, we can be happy at how little we know about pitchers.
2014		Regardless of your baseball rooting interests, if you don�t dig watching Sale pitch you�re probably immune to joy. A rail-thin lefty scarecrow, Sale uses a flailing corkscrew delivery that he miraculously manages to repeat; hitters can�t feel comfortable facing a mid-90s heater or darting slider delivered by a 6-foot-6 version of the Tasmanian Devil. Sale continues to confound those who expect his arm to fall off, reaching the 200-inning plateau for the first time last season and earning a non-inverted �W� in the All-Star Game. Pitching in the hitter-friendly Cell inflates his traditional numbers and masks some of his true value, but outstanding command of his dominating stuff makes Sale one of baseball�s few true aces. At least until he breaks.
2013		Sale's season was the 20th-best, based on pitcher WARP, by a White Sox hurler since 1950, and the seventh-best WARP-per-inning for a White Sox starting pitcher in that span. An early-season MRI gave everyone a scare�prompting a relief outing and discussion of a full-time move to the bullpen�but the results came back clean. Predictably for a pitcher increasing his workload to career highs after a season in relief, Sale wore down as the summer wore on, his velocity and effectiveness dipping, allowing batters an OPS over 790 after August 1. If Sale had a textbook delivery, there would be minimal concern about the innings, but he doesn't: Terms like �elbow drag,� �Inverted W,� and �terrifying� are bandied about. It's a tightrope he's walking, because that funky delivery allows his sinker-slider combination to erase left-handed batters, and his changeup has become good enough that righties no longer look forward to facing him, either.
2012		Sale spent his first full season in the bigs working out of the pen, moving his way up the bullpen pecking order and leaving White Sox fans hoping for great things. The lanky lefty has terrific velocity, unleashing mid-90s heat from a low three-quarters slot while mixing in a plus changeup, but it was the in-season development of a new slider grip that helped Sale baffle hitters to the tune of .154/.233/.265 in the second half. The Sox will move him to the rotation this year, and if Sale can continue to hold hitters to a .220 TAv�better than Jered Weaver�he�ll be a Cy Young candidate. But extrapolating those numbers to a full starter workload is just the sort of voodoo sabermetrics you should learn to ignore during an election year. Nevertheless, Sale has the stuff to front Chicago�s rotation for a long time, and his future is now.
2011		Sale was seen in some quarters as the top college arm available last June, so the Sox were understandably delighted that the big power lefty fell to them with the 13th overall pick. With a fastball that sits in the mid-90s and tops out at 98, supplemented with a polished change, he didn't have much to prove in the minors if only tasked with relief work, which put him in the majors less than two months after being drafted. The question now is whether the pen was just a workload-minded vehicle for Sale's fast-track adaptation to the pro game, or if he might get moved back to starting. Questions about Peavy's availability early in the season will define what is immediately possible, but the chance for Sale's total innings count to be managed via pitching in the skippable fifth slot and then limited by a return to the pen upon Peavy's return would be a great way to make sure the lanky lefty gets employed to good effect.

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PITCHf/x Pitcher Profile

A Collaboration between BrooksBaseball.net and Baseball Prospectus - Pitch classifications provided by Pitch Info LLC

Chris Sale has thrown 32,845 pitches that have been tracked by the PITCHf/x system between 2010 and 2025, all of them occuring in Spring Training. In 2025, he has relied primarily on his Slider (79mph) and Fourseam Fastball (95mph), also mixing in a Change (87mph). He also rarely throws a Sinker (94mph).