When healthy, Chris Sale has been good. Great, even. There\u2019s little question about that. As a fastball-slider guy with a changeup mixed in occasionally, you probably won\u2019t be surprised to know that the reason Sale has had an epic-tier career is because both pitches bamboozle hitters. <\/p>\n
With the White Sox<\/a>, Sale threw his fastball at least half the time (different pitch classification systems disagree on the split of four-seamers versus sinkers). With the Red Sox<\/a>, the fastball usage decreased to about half the time fairly consistently, with sliders being thrown around a third of the time. Last year, the Braves tweaked his pitch mix, moving his fastball rate down to around 45 percent, and boosting his slider usage to around 40 percent.<\/p>\n Which brings us to this year, where Sale is leaning on his slider more than ever before \u2014 he\u2019s close to throwing it more than half the time, and it\u2019s the first time he\u2019s thrown more sliders than fastballs in his career (were the season to end today, anyway). <\/p>\n You can get why this is occurring. First, the slider is disastrous for hitters: it\u2019s always been above-average for a slider, and his teeny-tiny .185 xwOBA-against on it this year is the lowest it\u2019s been since 2018. On the flip side, Sale\u2019s well-documented velocity-slash-arm-angle-slash-location-issues (all part of the game nexus of early-season adjustments and finding himself, it seems to me) have caused some problems for him: his four-seamer still has a horrifying .414 xwOBA-against, and its lowest whiff rate for his primary fastball since he was primarily throwing things that moved like sinkers before the 2020s. \u201cThrow a devastating pitch more\u201d is fine advice, and that\u2019s what Sale is doing to help right his ship.<\/p>\n But, my question is \u2014 is he going to keep doing it? Maybe even push that slider usage above 50 percent? Or, are we going to see something that reverts back to what he did last year, with his four-seamer picking up substantial steam as the season winds on?<\/p>\n Daily Notes<\/p>\n Record: 17-18<\/p>\n Yesterday\u2019s wOBA and xwOBA: .263 \/ .238 (Season rank: 13th | 11th)<\/p>\n Yesterday\u2019s wOBA and xwOBA allowed: .231 \/ .234 (Season rank: 17th | 13th)<\/p>\n Yesterday\u2019s homers: 0<\/p>\n Yesterday\u2019s homers allowed: 0<\/p>\n Record when out-xwOBAing: 12-8 (League: 393-137)<\/p>\n Record when out-xwOBAed: 5-10 (League: 137-393)<\/p>\n Record when out-wOBAing: 16-2 (League: 452-80)<\/p>\n Record when out-wOBAed: 1-16 (League: 80-452)<\/p>\n Record when outhomering: 8-3 (League: 273-79)<\/p>\n Record when outhomered: 3-10 (League: 79-273)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When healthy, Chris Sale has been good. Great, even. There\u2019s little question about that. As a fastball-slider guy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7986,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2394],"tags":[196,191,46,4166,5,200,192,4684,3494,181,1854,176,4,292,201,4709,5508,5509,189,5510,1776,1319],"class_list":{"0":"post-7985","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-atlanta-braves","8":"tag-a","9":"tag-atlanta","10":"tag-atlanta-braves","11":"tag-atlantabraves","12":"tag-baseball","13":"tag-battery","14":"tag-braves","15":"tag-category-community-comments","16":"tag-chris","17":"tag-front-page","18":"tag-high","19":"tag-in","20":"tag-mlb","21":"tag-new","22":"tag-power","23":"tag-sale","24":"tag-set","25":"tag-slider","26":"tag-this","27":"tag-usage","28":"tag-will","29":"tag-year"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/114466738969699783","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7985\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}