Since finishing off the 2018 World Series for the Boston Red Sox, Chris Sale’s career has been crushed by injuries year after year, and his bounce-back campaign after an offseason trade to the Atlanta Braves has been remarkable so far.
After five years of near-constant injury issues, Sale is off to a vintage start to the 2024 season and is now leading all of baseball in one impressive category.
StatMuse shared that Sale has more starts of logging at least seven innings this season than anybody else in baseball, as the ace has now gone seven in eight of his 13 starts so far.
No pitcher has more starts going 7+ innings this season than Chris Sale. pic.twitter.com/Afif5y6wKS
At 35 years old, Sale has found the fountain of youth and looks like the guy who chewed up the American League for the better part of a decade, as he is now 9-2 with a 2.98 ERA and 99 strikeouts to just 13 walks.
He has been a revelation after being traded from the Red Sox this offseason for Vaughn Grissom and is making good on the two-year, $38 million extension he signed after the trade.
Sale has led one of the league’s best rotations alongside Max Fried, Reynaldo Lopez, and Charlie Morton that lost its ace, Spencer Strider, to elbow surgery early in the season.
Atlanta will need to continue leaning on its new ace after also losing superstar Ronald Acuna Jr. to a torn ACL in recent weeks, and this pitching staff will now be relied upon as the anchor to this ballclub.
It has been one of the feel-good subplots of this early season, and baseball is better when Chris Sale is whipping his frisbee sliders into the right-handed batters box on a weekly basis.