Thursday’s nationally televised showdown between the Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers brought about bittersweet feelings while watching Chris Sale’s latest masterpiece.
Some of us are old enough to remember Sale debuting in Aug. 2010, just weeks after the Chicago White Sox selected him No. 13 overall. All of these years later and the veteran lefty is still pitching, albeit with some gray sprinkled in through his beard.
Sale has engineered another Cy Young-worthy year, and Thursday’s shutout — his first since 2019 — dropped his ERA to a career-best 2.06. He recorded 11 strikeouts against the Dodgers and walked none, moving the Braves within one game of the Dodgers for the NL’s No. 2 seed.
“That’s probably one of the top two pitching performances I’ve seen during my time in the big leagues,” Braves catcher Drake Baldwin said. “From pitch one, he was just locked in and executing pitches. It’s pretty incredible.”
For as talented and loaded as the Dodgers’ roster is, they’re lacking an ace of Sale’s caliber headed into October.
Chris Sale gives the Atlanta Braves a hidden advantage over the Los Angeles Dodgers
Now in fairness to the Dodgers, Tarik Skubal is the two-time defending AL Cy Young winner. However, he has a 3.38 ERA over four starts with his new team, and his walk rate has skyrocketed from 3.7 percent with the Tigers to 7.1 percent in Los Angeles.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto has had another fine year, and his postseason track record speaks for itself. But neither are delivering at a dominant level like Sale, and let’s not forget the Dodgers are banking on the injury-prone Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow to step up in October. Good luck with that one.
Both the eye test and the analytics leave no arguing that Sale has been phenomenal throughout his age-37 season. His bWAR sits at 5.2, giving him an outside chance of surpassing 6.0 for the second time in three years. What’s especially remarkable is that he was only worth 2.6 bWAR in 31 starts from 2021-23.
The Sale renaissance is the best thing that could have happened to the Braves. Spencer Strider is a liability, Bryce Elder is a solid but unspectacular No. 2, and the Braves lost Spencer Schwellenbach to season-ending elbow surgery on Friday. Yet a once-perennial All-Star seemingly at the end of his career has solidified himself as a Hall of Famer.
Then again, we’re collectively better off with the Dodgers not having Sale to pitch alongside Skubal and Yamamoto. Talk about competitive balance issues.
Atlanta would be the No. 3 seed and host No. 6 San Diego if the postseason began today. In theory, Sale should have no problem carving through a mediocre Padres lineup, though the surging Fernando Tatis Jr. might give him trouble. The Dodgers would have a first-round bye and face the highest-seed remaining in the NLDS.
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