False starters
Sale’s latest ace turned playoff disgrace
HOUSTON — How hard is it for the Red Sox to find a starter who can pitch well in the playoffs?
Not to go all Jon Lester on everyone, but apparently it’s extremely difficult. As in, impossibly difficult.
Chris Sale yesterday joined the ranks of David Price and Rick Porcello as aces who don’t pitch like aces for the Red Sox in October.
The resemblance could not be much more disturbing.
Sale, after all, pitched like Pedro Martinez in the first half before stumbling down the stretch with a concerning mix of very good to very bad starts.
But the plan, you see, was that the extra rest before the playoffs was supposed to make all the difference for a pitcher who traditionally fades in September. Plus, many of us reasoned, Sale’s warrior complex inoculated him from a playoff flop.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. A No. 1 starter, Cy Youngcaliber or not, is not worth much if he can’t pitch like one in October.
Last year, Porcello finished a Cy Young season and gave up five runs in 41⁄3 innings against the Indians. Then Price, who was pitching decently by season’s end after a rocky start, lived up to his postseason bad rap as a bad starter by needing only 31⁄3 innings to allow five runs in Game 2.
And then along came Sale, who coughed up seven runs in five innings yesterday.
Good luck this afternoon, Drew Pomeranz. The bar you need to clear lies at your ankles.
“Just got to be better, no excuses — bad time to suck,” said Sale. “Like I said, take it off the chin and be back here tomorrow, working my (butt) off ready to go.” Swell. The Astros have a tremendous lineup, so full credit to them for taking full advantage every time Sale slipped from nasty, filthy sliders and rising fastballs to throwing batting practice.
No pitcher is perfect, but those who flirt with perfection like Sale did for so much of the season and then deviate from their track record look worse. Like Sale said, his timing was, uh, bad.
The Astros’ timing was perfect. The mixture was devastating to a team that thought it had traded for a postseason stopper in the mold of Lester in 2013, Josh Beckett in 2007 and Curt Schilling in 2004.
Instead Sale turned into nobody special. Talk about your letdowns.
Everything conspired against the Red Sox and particularly Sale, and nobody could offer a satisfying explanation. Pitching coach Carl Willis said fatigue played a role with Sale, as did being amped up. Sale wasn’t buying it. “Nah, it was just location,” said Sale. “Made bad pitches to good hitters. I can’t do that, especially early on. Like I said, I put my guys in a pretty bad hole early on. That’s not an easy place to come back from, especially on the road.”
John Farrell was not buying, at least not yet, that fatigue finally caught up to Sale.
“I don’t know that you’re going to pinpoint any one reason, there’s probably a combination of factors,” the manager said. “We know that this is a quickstrike offense that we’re going up against and when you don’t locate, things can happen quickly. That was the case today.
“So at this point in time of the year, starting pitchers, you’ve got workloads that you’re dealing with and trying to do whatever you can to adjust routines in between starts to allow for appropriate rest or additional rest or allow things to be as fresh and as crisp as possible. That wasn’t the case today.”
It’s never fun to listen to any pitcher explain an outing after a poor one. Sale’s no different than Price or Porcello on that front.
“You’ve got to mix it up against a team like this. Can’t just go out there laying it in there,” said Sale. “Try to keep them offbalance and not give them too many looks at the same pitch. It just didn’t work out.”
What can he say, really? And the Red Sox didn’t trade for Sale for his oratory skills. They traded for an ace.
They had one for most of the season. Then October happened. And Sale turned into a pumpkin just like the others.