Chris Sale is in the middle of a season that looks nothing like the one most pitchers are having at 37.
Eight days ago, the Braves left-hander put together one of the signature outings of his career, a complete-game shutout of the Dodgers that came with 11 strikeouts. It was his 95th career game with double-digit strikeouts, seventh-most all time, and it dropped his ERA to 2.06. That mark is second in the National League only to the Brewers’ Jacob Misiorowski at 1.97, with Misiorowski the last obstacle in Sale’s path toward a second Cy Young Award.
Sale gets his next chance Friday night at Citizens Bank Park, where he will start the opener of a huge four-game series between the first-place Braves (83-57) and the second-place Phillies (79-61). And if you have not seen him this year, the headline is simple: he is throwing harder than ever.
That was on full display against Los Angeles. Sale reached Shohei Ohtani with an elevated 99.6 mph four-seam fastball, the seventh-fastest strikeout pitch of his career and his quickest since 2018.
Later in the game, he hit 100.1 mph to Ohtani, his fastest pitch since July 6, 2018, and finished his 109th and final pitch at 98.6 mph to blow by Alex Call. In all, Sale logged 14 pitches at 98.0 mph or higher, the fifth time this season he has done that in a game.
Before this year, he had not done it since 2018.
“He's throwing harder than he ever has at 37 years old,” Braves manager Walt Weiss said last week.
The velocity jump is the story. Sale’s four-seam fastball has moved from 94.8 mph in 2025 to 96.1 mph in 2026.
His two-seamer, which he uses 34% of the time against left-handed hitters, has climbed from 94.0 mph to 95.7 mph over the same stretch. Only 15 qualified pitchers have had a bigger year-over-year increase in average fastball velocity.
The result is a fastball that has gone from ordinary to a weapon. Sale’s four-seamer now sits above the slider as his top pitch, and it is also his most valuable one.
In 2025, opponents hit .320 against it with a .503 slugging percentage, a 21.1% whiff rate and a -4 run value. This season, those numbers have flipped to a .217 average, .340 slugging percentage, a 26.5% whiff rate and a +13 run value.
The pitch itself has not changed much in shape. It still comes from Sale’s low, side-arm slot with the same unusual movement.
But the added heat has transformed it. Stuff+ grades it at 113 this season, up from 105 last year, on a scale where 100 is considered average.
Sale is also using the pitch differently. He is turning to the fastball for strikeouts more often, throwing it 42% of the time in two-strike counts this year, up from 32% last season. Hitters are still late on it, too: 42% of swings against Sale’s four-seamer are late, well above the major league average of 26%.
For Sale, this is about more than one hot night or one electric pitch. He is doing it at 37, in his 16th big league season, and doing it as a starting pitcher.
When he first reached the majors in August 2010 with the White Sox, he was working out of the bullpen and averaged 97.0 mph with his two-seamer. The next season, that average dropped to 96.0 mph.
Fifteen years later, he is back in that neighborhood, only now he is sustaining it as a starter.
That kind of late-career fastball surge is almost unheard of. In the pitch-tracking era, which dates to 2008, only one other pitcher has thrown a 100.0+ mph pitch at age 37 or older: Jacob deGrom. And among starting pitchers age 37 or older, deGrom is the only one besides Sale to sustain elite average fastball velocity over a full season.
Sale’s 96.0 mph average fastball this year puts him among rare company for older starters, alongside deGrom, Charlie Morton and Justin Verlander. It also stands out because he is doing it from the left side, where the league average fastball is slower and only three qualified left-handed starters are throwing harder than he is.
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