Resurgent Sale makes it that much harder to doubt Red Sox
Amid the considerable hype and hoopla, as the baseball world feverishly geared up for the latest installment in a rivalry so historic (and, at times, acrimonious) that it literally became known as The Rivalry, one huge uncertainty hung in the air like that Giancarlo Stanton homer from Wednesday's American League wild-card game.
What's the deal with Chris Sale?
Due to persistent shoulder inflammation, Sale threw just 29 innings after the All-Star break, and didn't complete five in an outing after Aug. 12. In his final regular-season outing, which came one day after Boston Red Sox president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski picked him to start Game 1 of the American League Division Series, Sale's velocity went MIA. His four-seam fastball, which typically hovers around 96 mph, was coming in almost six ticks lower than that. Manager Alex Cora blamed it on faulty mechanics. Skeptics suspected his shoulder was still chooched. Insofar as a 108-win team can be concerned, there was cause to be.
Then, on Thursday, ahead of his Game 1 start against the New York Yankees - who ensured #TheRivalry would spill into October for the first time since 2004 with a convincing 7-2 victory over the Oakland Athletics in Tuesday's play-in game - Sale notably said it's incumbent on him to get the job done regardless of how good his stuff is, enabling cynics to speculate that his stuff, right now, still isn't at its best.
"I don't care what I have on a given day, I should be able to find a way with whatever I have," Sale told reporters. "Sometimes you go out there and have your best, sometimes you don't. This is sport. This is baseball. You have to find a way with whatever you have on any given day and roll with it."
On Friday, he found a way, turning in a performance that erased any lingering corpuscle of doubt as to whether or not he can be relied upon throughout Boston's postseason run. Because even without his top-shelf velocity - his four-seamer sat at 94.6 mph, still below average for him - Sale still quieted the Yankees with relative ease, frustrating one of baseball's elite offensive teams in an eventual 5-4 victory at Fenway Park by relying on his plus-plus offspeed pitches and exploiting a level of pitchability that's simply unfair for a pitcher with his raw talents to possess. His bottom line - two earned runs over 5 1/3 innings - belied how good he looked. Both runs charged to him scored after he was lifted in the top of the sixth, with runners on first and second and his count pitch at 93, for a terribly ineffective Ryan Brasier.
Continuing a trend he started in late-September when his velocity first started to wane, Sale threw more offspeed pitches than fastballs in Game 1, according to Baseball Savant, and was loath to throw his heater in fastball counts. Of the 22 batters he faced, only 10 saw first-pitch fastballs; in the three 3-1 counts he found himself in, Sale threw changeups twice; in his two 2-0 counts, he went once with a changeup and the other time, a two-seamer; and in his six full counts, he went offspeed half the time (two sliders, one changeup, and three four-seamers). And it worked. Sale, who had aimed to throw around 100 pitches, allowed five hits - all singles - and a pair of walks while notching eight strikeouts, and induced a boatload of weak contact. His average exit velocity for the night, 86.2 mph, was actually slightly better than his StatCast era average, and, more importantly, his groundouts outnumbered his flyouts, five to one.
"I thought he was good," Yankees manager Aaron Boone said, according to Chris Cotillo of MassLive.com. "You know, not his dominant self necessarily, but I thought he did a really nice job of mixing his pitches, changing speeds."
As Boone rightly observed, this isn't quite the version of Sale that carved up the American League for the first three months of the season, but this version is still damn good. And given the strength of Boston's lineup, which led the majors in runs scored this year, Sale doesn't have to be better than damn good for his team to have a really good chance to win: when Sale put up a Game Score of at least 60 during the regular season, as he did Friday night, the Red Sox went 13-6. Frankly, that's probably why Boone opted to start J.A. Happ in Game 1, not wanting to squander a potential gem from Masahiro Tanaka in a game that may well be unwinnable. (Incidentally, after Sale was removed with a five-run lead in the sixth, Boston's relievers, bless their hearts, did their best to give New York a chance to steal a victory.)
Ultimately, with Boston's most glaring issue now pretty satisfactorily resolved - even though concerns about its relief corps remain extremely valid - it's hard to credibly argue that there's an opponent it doesn't stack up well against for a best-of-five or best-of-seven series, during which Sale will start multiple times, and potentially come out of the bullpen, too.
"If they want me to throw 150, I’m throwing 150," Sale said following Game 1.
At some point, as good as the Yankees and the rest of the AL powerhouses are, casting aspersions on the team that won 108 games crosses the line between healthily skeptical and intellectually dishonest.
Now that the Red Sox have a 1-0 lead over the Yankees, thanks, in part, to a strong outing from their resurgent ace, it feels like we're at that point.
Jonah Birenbaum is theScore's senior MLB writer. He steams a good ham. You can find him on Twitter @birenball.