Sale ready to ‘make noise’
Hurler a 'full go' at spring training, targets Opening Day
FORT MYERS, FLA. >> It’s been four years since Chris Sale had a normal spring training.
Five, including 2019, when Alex Cora didn’t use his starting rotation very much during spring training, wanting to give them a bit of extra rest after a full postseason run the October before.
So, when the 34-year-old lefty threw a bullpen session on Wednesday morning, he came away with a huge smile. Available to reporters later in the day, he said he’s not only “full go,” but could’ve done more. “What I threw today, I could’ve done that to hitters… if they told me I had to face hitters tomorrow, I wouldn’t have a problem with it, I’d like it.”
Sale speaks like a caged animal itching to roam free, and in a sense, that’s exactly what the last few years have been like for him. The fiery competitor’s 2019 campaign ended in August, and he had Tommy John surgery in April 2020. He returned in August 2021, only to miss the first half of the 2022 season with a rib fracture. In his first start last season, he looked like the Chris Sale of yore, mowing down Rays in a five-inning shutout performance, but five days later, only two outs into a start in the Bronx, a line-drive comebacker fractured his pinky.
The cherry on top of the bad-luck sundae came in August, when he fell off his bicycle and broke his wrist after a rehab session for that surgically-repaired pinky.
The veteran lefty is living a life straight out of the lyrics to Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life.” He’s been up and down and over and out: the American League Cy Young runner-up in 2017, and a champion in 2018. For seven consecutive seasons between 2012-18, he finished in sixth or better in Cy Young voting and was an All-Star each year.
But since August 2019, he’s pitched 48 1/3 big-league innings across 11 starts. And without him — though, of course, not entirely due to his absence — the Red Sox have finished last in their division twice in three years.
Sale is open about the toll this roller coaster has taken on him.
“When you kind of look at my career, if you get to 2018, you throw the last pitch of the World Series, show up next spring training, sign a contract, what could go wrong, right? The answer that question was, just about everything. So I know how quickly it can be gone,” he said Wednesday.
Don’t mistake that vulnerability for pity-seeking, though. At Winter Weekend and in Fort Myers, he spoke of perspective, noting that the timeline of his Tommy John and subsequent injuries ran parallel to the early months of the coronavirus pandemic in America and Hurricane Ian, which ravaged the west coast of Florida last September. “People lost their homes, I nicked a pinky, broke a wrist,” he said Wednesday.
Will Sale be the Opening Day starter? It’s far too early to announce, but he and Cora both say he’s on track to be ready. If he’s finally able to pick himself up and get back in the race, the 2023 Red Sox are a whole new ballgame.
Or as he said on Wednesday, “We’re here to make some noise. Say what you want, I like where we’re at.”