Braves star Chris Sale secures National League Triple Crown; will miss wild-card series

Chris Sale didn’t get to pitch in the Atlanta Braves’ regular-season finale, but he still led the National League this summer.

The Braves’ ace won the pitching Triple Crown in the NL, leading the league in wins, ERA and strikeouts. Sale finishes the season with 18 wins, a 2.38 ERA and 225 strikeouts.

That makes this just the second time in the past century that pitchers have won the Triple Crown in both leagues in the same season. Detroit Tigers’ pitcher Tarik Skubal locked up the Triple Crown in the American League on Sunday. The last time this happened was 2011, when Clayton Kershaw (NL) and Justin Verlander (AL) each took home the award. Before that, the last time there were dual Triple Crown winners was in 1924.

Their accomplishments should dictate the Cy Young Award voting this year, too, as no pitcher has ever failed to win the Cy Young after winning the Triple Crown.

Sale was scheduled to pitch in the second game of a rescheduled doubleheader against the New York Mets on Monday, but he was scratched at the last second due to back spasms — which reportedly first hit him Sunday night. After the Braves won the second game of the doubleheader without Sale to reach the playoffs, the Braves announced their ace would miss the entire wild-card series against the San Diego Padres because of the injury.

While Sale and Skubal profile quite similarly as funky left-handers with enough velocity to overpower hitters, they took very different paths to the Triple Crown.

Chris Sale had a career year at age 35

Sale wasn’t quite a reclamation product for the Braves, but you would’ve been hard-pressed to find an objective observer who didn’t think he was past his prime.

The 35-year-old was one of the best pitchers in baseball from 2012 to 2018, a span of time that culminated with a World Series title with the Boston Red Sox. The cracks started showing in 2019, when Sale posted a career-worst 4.40 ERA and missed the last month and a half of the season due to elbow inflammation.

Tommy John surgery followed in 2020. Sale returned in 2021 and made only nine starts. Then he made only two starts in a 2022 season that can only be described as “cursed.” Sale missed time due to a preseason rib fracture, then a fractured finger, then a fractured wrist. The latter occurred in a bike accident.

The 2023 season was comparatively better for Sale, with a 4.30 ERA in 20 starts, but it didn’t change the perception that his best days were behind him. Still, the Braves opted to buy low by sending Vaughn Grissom, a young but light-hitting middle infielder, to Boston in exchange for Sale, plus $17 million in cash to cover his remaining salary.

And now, this.

What changed for Sale? In addition to an increase of 1 mph throughout his arsenal, Sale threw his slider a career-high 40.3% of the time, per Baseball Savant, at the expense of his four-seam fastball. Hitters had a harder time squaring him up, with decreases across the board in his meaningful batted-ball metrics.

But most of all, Sale stayed healthy until the final day of the regular season, something that seemed unlikely between his age and his having some of the most violent mechanics in baseball. The result will be his first career Cy Young Award, something that eluded him in his dominant days in the American League.