Chris Sale's career renaissance with the Atlanta Braves has been fun to watch. Most baseball fans left Sale for dead in Boston and assumed that his repeated injury issues made Sale a non-factor, despite how good he once was. The Braves clearly saw more than that in Sale, traded Vaughn Grissom for him, and ended up getting a Cy Young-caliber arm for next to nothing.
Given his age and the miles on his arm, it is remarkable that Sale's stuff continues to be as dominant as it is. In fact, we are still getting surprised by what he is capable of. Against the Guardians on Sunday, everyone was shocked to see Sale regularly hitting 98 mph and touching 99 with his fastball. For those who predicted Sale's impending demise, those predictions were obviously premature.
However, a curious trend has begun in the early going of the 2026 season. While Sale's fastball is as good as ever, his previously unhittable slider has been strangely...hittable.
The drop-off with Chris Sale's slider isn't being talked about enough right now
If you were to ignore Sale's other pitches for a moment, the numbers opposing hitters are putting up against his slider would be genuinely concerning, given that it is his signature pitch. For the last two seasons, Sale's breaking stuff graded out as the best of the best. While the numbers were weird during that stretch when Sale was hurt in Boston, his dominant slider remained, going back to his years with the White Sox. Without his slider being insane, Sale probably doesn't have nearly as many top 5 Cy Young finishes as he has.
However, something has changed in 2026. On average, in an admittedly small sample, Sale's slider is getting significantly less movement both on the vertical and horizontal axes. The pitch is still moving enough to be passable, but losing multiple inches in both directions is rough. The results speak for themselves as opposing hitters are hitting .286 against the slider when they previously would be hitting well below .200 (.143 in 2025 and .171 in 2024, just to give a couple of data points).
The good news is that while Sale's slider isn't where he wants it right now, his fastball has mostly made up the difference. Previously, Sale's four-seamer was arguably his most hittable pitch, no matter how hard he was throwing it. However, the four-seam has been great in 2026 as opposing hitters are only hitting .206 off of it, which is 50-100+ points better than where it previously performed, depending on which season you compare against.
That is a long way to explain that Sale is pitching fine, but there is some weird stuff happening. If he can find a way to take this newfound success with his heater and combine it with how good his slider was before this season, we might see the best version of Sale we have seen in a decade. However, if the fastball backs up as the season progresses and the slider fails to rebound, things could spiral downward in a hurry.
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