Leading into Friday, Chris Sale had made three consecutive starts with the season on the line and came up empty in all three.
He had done little to convince the Red Sox he was worth betting on.
They did it anyway.
Chosen over Nathan Eovaldi to start Game 1 of the American League Championship Series against the Houston Astros, Sale couldn’t get out of the third inning. He allowed only one run, but departed quickly, leaving two men on base with two outs in the second when Adam Ottavino replaced him.
Ottavino escaped the jam, but the bullpen eventually fell apart as the Astros scored in the sixth, seventh and eighth to mount a comeback and take Game 1 by a score of 5-4.
Flashing the hardest fastball he’s thrown all year and a slider spinning more ferociously than it has been, Sale still made it look difficult out there. Nothing has been easy for him, and it was no different on Friday, when he couldn’t get the Astros’ to chase too many pitches out of the zone and manager Alex Cora saw enough to pull the plug early.
Sale put at least two men on base in each of the three innings he started. The Astros only scored one, when a walk, single and sacrifice fly pushed across one in the first inning, but it didn’t look pretty. The ‘Stros collected five hits, they walked once and they reached once on a hit-by-pitch. Sale threw 61 pitches, 37 for strikes, and struck out only two batters.
Sale thought it was a big step forward from his last outing, which wasn’t exactly a high bar to have crossed. But he acknowledged it wasn’t good enough.
“I wish I would have gone a little bit longer,” he said. “It’s not up to me to decide. And like I said, I will never second-guess AC. What he does is what it is and we fight for him no matter what. But on the flip side of that, from a personal standpoint, I have to get more outs. There is no way around that.
“When you’re asking your bullpen to go out there and throw seven innings of zeroes, that’s a lot. When you’re asking for four, three, sometimes even five, it’s tough. I think next time out I have to get a little more length out there and give those guys a little more leniency.”
Why Sale was starting in Game 1 over Eovaldi was itself a question to be asked. Cora said he chose Sale for a few reasons.
Cora thought Sale made some important adjustments in his mechanics in the days leading up this one and would pitch better this time.
He was well-rested, with plenty of time to think about how to make some fixes after throwing just one inning eight days earlier, when he got shelled by the Rays for five runs in the first inning and never returned for the second.
The bullpen was rested, too, which meant Cora could rely more heavily on his arsenal of relief options behind Sale in Game 1.
Tanner Houck, Hansel Robles and Hirokazu Sawamura allowed runs to score in the sixth, seventh and eighth, ruining Cora’s plan.
But what could have the Red Sox expected from Sale in this game? After the poor outings against bad teams, and his terrible outing in Tampa, and a season’s worth of decent-but-not dominant starts in the final two months, Sale has proven that he’s still not back to form.
That’s not to say he can’t be effective regardless. He has been, at times. He had no trouble running through some bad competition for the majority of his nine regular season starts, though it was hard to tell how he’d fare against better teams. The only top-tier offense he faced was that of the Rays, a team that scored a combined seven runs (three earned) over 9-2/3 innings in two starts in early September.
It’s just that he was never Sale.
He was fine. Not great. Not bad. Just fine, and a fine performance from Sale is good enough to win on most nights.
That wasn’t the case during the final two stats of the season, despite coming against a pair of last-place teams in the Orioles and Nationals who were both fielding less than adequate lineups and yet seemed thrilled to play spoiler to the Red Sox’ playoff hopes.
Sale allowed three runs in 5-1/3 innings to the Orioles in a game the Sox needed but lost, then gave up two runs in just 2-1/3 innings against the Nats in another game the Sox needed, and this time they won despite him, on the final day of the season.
He was awful in Tampa in the Division Series last week, and the Sox again won despite him.
Something just hasn’t clicked.
The game has changed drastically this year, as it does every year, but perhaps more so now with the removal of sticky substances forcing many pitchers to alter the way they do business. And it certainly takes time to return to form after a year-plus away from the game recovering from elbow surgery.
There’s no need to sound the alarm on Sale’s future. It’s more of a right-now problem. And right now, it’s a clear problem that he’s struggling to get through clean innings and relying on the bullpen to bail him out.
“He wants to go deeper in the game, but where we were bullpen-wise and the matchups that we had, we felt that that was the right time to take him out,” Cora said “But I do believe he threw the ball a lot better, so he will be ready for his next one.”
It’s hard to argue the Red Sox are better off for having started Sale in this game. They burned six relievers in the game and lost. They will start the series 0-1, losing a chance to pick up some key momentum in a series that the Sox are considered underdogs in.
The silver lining is that Eovaldi gets the ball in Game 2. He’s the only starter the Red Sox can rely on right now.
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October 16, 2021 at 02:16PM
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Mastrodonato: Red Sox’ choice of Chris Sale over Nathan Eovaldi for Game 1 start didn’t pay off - Boston Herald
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