Chris Sale is 37 years old. On Thursday night, he threw a 100.1 mph fastball to Shohei Ohtani, struck out 11 Dodgers without issuing a walk, and completed a 1-0 shutout.
He also put up a +50.1 Soldier Score.
The fastball was Sale’s first pitch measured at 100 mph since 2018. The shutout was his first since 2019. According to MLB, he became only the sixth pitcher since 1900 to record at least 10 strikeouts without a walk in a shutout at 37 years and 150 days or older.
But what about his season as a whole?
Through August 27, Sale has a 2.06 ERA, 177 strikeouts, and 5.2 bWAR in 144 innings. He has already joined one of the smallest and most impressive groups of veteran pitchers in baseball history.
Using bWAR, I searched for every pitcher who produced at least 5.0 bWAR during his age-37 season. Fun fact: baseball age is determined by a player’s age on June 30. I did not know that. Now I do.
Some people (Will from Overdue Sports) are going to start complaining about Dazzy Vance and other old-timers being on this list. However, 15 of the 20 names are post 1976.
Randy Johnson’s 2001 masterpiece- 10.1 bWAR, a 2.49 ERA, and 372 strikeouts- remains in another universe. Sale is not catching that.
The closest modern comparison is Max Scherzer’s 2022 season with the New York Mets (lol). Scherzer accumulated 5.3 bWAR over 145⅓ innings. Sale currently has 5.2 bWAR over 144 innings. Of course, Sale still has a month to go in the season.
Sale currently owns a 203 ERA+, meaning his run prevention has been more than twice league average after adjusting for ballpark and league factors. That is the highest ERA+ of anyone in this five-WAR age-37 group. Again, still a month to go, but it will be tough for Sale to come close to the innings of these other players. 17 of the other pitchers threw at least 197 innings. Twelve surpassed 230. Cy Young threw 380.
Cracking the Top 10 is definitely within reach. Reaching 6.0 bWAR would move him into the top ten, and right now he is on pace for 6.3. Here is my chance to sneak in a nice Stat Soldier graphic.
Three years ago, the question was whether Chris Sale could stay healthy long enough to resemble himself again. Then he won the Cy Young, and now he is having arguably a top-3 season of his career. Kind of crazy to look at his career numbers and then consider that from 2020-2023 he only pitched in 31 games.
Not surprisingly, the Hall of Fame conversations now start to heat up again.
Baseball-Reference currently has Chris Sale with 62.4 career bWAR and 42.0 WAR7 and a 52.2 JAWS score. He remains below the Hall of Fame starter averages of 73.0 career WAR, 49.8 peak WAR and 61.4 JAWS, but the workload-adjusted S-JAWS system lowers the positional benchmark to 56.8.
S-JAWS was made to try to account for some of the massive WAR totals from the 19th and 20th centuries. Sale’s 52.2 S-JAWS already places him ahead of recent Hall of Famers CC Sabathia, while putting him almost even with Bob Feller. Feller battled the Nazis, and CC battled clogged arteries, so you have to take that into account as well.
I believe he will enter Cooperstown. By the time he is eligible, the standard for modern pitchers will force voters to change their mindset. They already started to, with CC being a great example, so Sale should have no issue.