In his 16th big league season, 37-year-old Chris Sale may be writing the finest chapter of his storied career.
Eight days ago, Sale authored one of his best games ever, blanking the Dodgers in a complete-game shutout. Sale struck out 11 hitters — his 95th career game with double-digit strikeouts, seventh most all time — and shaved his ERA to 2.06. That’s the second-lowest mark in the National League behind the Brewers’ Jacob Misiorowski (1.97), the final boss standing between Sale and his second Cy Young Award.
Sale will look to further his candidacy when he climbs the mound at Citizens Bank Park on Friday night, opening a seismic four-game tilt between the first-place Braves (83-57) and second-place Phillies (79-61). And if you haven’t watched the lanky left-hander pitch yet this season, get ready for something a little bit different — and a whole lot faster.
Let’s go back to Sale’s outing against the Dodgers for a second. Forget all of the cool historical nuggets, of which there are many, and feast your eyes on this pitch.
That’s Sale blowing the doors off Shohei Ohtani with an elevated 99.6 mph four-seam fastball. It’s the seventh-fastest strikeout pitch of Sale’s career, and his fastest since 2018, and it pretty much sums up everything that’s going on with Sale these days.
Sale’s signature pitch is his slider, a unique weapon with plus horizontal movement that he hurls from a funky, low side-arm slot. In a two-year span from 2024-25, it was the most valuable pitch in baseball, accruing a +47 run value. Last season, he threw it 47.3% of the time, the highest single-season usage rate in his career.
This season is a different story.
Sale’s four-seam fastball has overtaken the slider as the No. 1 pitch in his arsenal. But not only that: It’s also his most valuable pitch.
The year-over-year improvement on Sale’s four-seamer is stunning.
Sale’s 4-seam fastball, by year
So, what’s behind the turnaround? Sometimes, even in a sport as nuanced and layered as baseball, things can be as simple as “more velocity makes a fastball better.”
Sale’s four-seam fastball velocity has jumped from 94.8 mph in 2025 to 96.1 mph in 2026. Even his two-seam fastball, which he uses 34% of the time against left-handed hitters, has spiked from 94.0 mph in ’25 to 95.7 mph in ’26. Overall, only 15 qualified pitchers have experienced a larger increase in average fastball velocity from last season to this season.
Sale put his premium velo on full display last Thursday against the Dodgers. He fired a 100.1 mph fastball to Ohtani, his fastest pitch since July 6, 2018. Sale’s 109th and final pitch was a 98.6 mph fastball that he blew by Alex Call. In total, Sale threw 14 pitches 98.0+ mph, the fifth time that he’s thrown at least 10 pitches that fast in a single game this season. Entering the year, Sale hadn’t done that in a game since 2018.
“He’s throwing harder than he ever has at 37 years old,” Braves manager Walt Weiss said last week.
Yes he is — at least as a starting pitcher. Sale broke into the Majors in August 2010, appearing in 21 games out of the bullpen for the White Sox. At the time, he threw a two-seam fastball, which averaged 97.0 mph. The following season, Sale’s average fastball velo dipped to 96.0 mph. Fifteen years later, he is throwing that hard again.
Let’s pause here to remember the other part of all this. Not only is Sale throwing hard — harder than he ever has. But he’s doing all of this in his age-37 season, furthering a late-career renaissance that might steer him all the way to Cooperstown.
Only one other pitcher has thrown a pitch 100.0+ mph at age 37 or older in the pitch-tracking era, which dates back to 2008. That’s Jacob deGrom, another freak of nature, who has cracked triple digits on the radar gun in each of the past two years.
This is about sustaining velo, too, not just rearing back and lighting up the gun every once in a while. Again, deGrom is the only other starting pitcher in the pitch-tracking era to match what Sale is doing.
Fastest avg. fastball velocity, SP, age-37 season or later (since 2008)
Min. 500 fastballs (4-seamers + sinkers) thrown
It’s a near-unprecedented uptick in fastball velo for a player this late into his career. The last player to improve their average fastball velocity by that much in their age-37 season or later was Johnny Cueto, who went from sitting 90.0 mph in 2022 to 92.0 mph in 2023. Still, there’s an obvious difference here: Cueto’s fastball velocity was in the 22nd percentile of MLB in ’23. Sale’s sits in the 75th percentile. This just doesn’t happen.
It also matters that Sale’s heat is coming from the left-hand side. Even in an era of ever-rising velocity, the average left-hander still throws slower (93.6 mph) than the average right-hander (95.3 mph). In fact, only three qualified left-handed starting pitchers throw harder than Sale.
Fastest avg. fastball velocity, LH SP, 2026
Min. 500 fastballs (4-seamers + sinkers) thrown
Everything else about Sale’s fastball is essentially unchanged. It’s the same shape, thrown from the same low release point and with the same outlier arm slot. But it’s a far better pitch than it was just last season, and not just because it’s generating better results. We can turn to Stuff+, which uses a model to try and grade how a nasty a pitch is based on its physical characteristics. On a scale where 100 is typically considered average, Sale’s four-seam fastball has a 113 Stuff+ in 2026, up from a 105 Stuff+ in 2025.
The uptick in velo — in stuff — has given Sale the freedom to use his fastball differently, too. It’s become a strikeout pitch. He’s throwing it 42% of the time this year in two-strike counts, compared to just 32% last season.
And why not? Batters can’t touch it. In May, Statcast released a new slew of bat tracking metrics that tell us — among other things — which pitches make hitters swing late most often. Few pitches are better at this than Sale’s four-seam fastball; 42% of swings on it are late. The Major League four-seamer average is just 26%. A late swing looks a lot like this:
That’s what Sale’s fastball is doing to everyone these days. Hitters can blame the uptick in velo, which has the 37-year-old squarely in the Cy Young race.