Braves Pitcher's New Pitch Named One of MLB's "Filthiest" Offerings

The Atlanta Braves got a guy with some nasty stuff to add to their rotation for the postseason

The Atlanta Braves are building for October. 

With a roster that's won 100+ games in two straight seasons and looks to be even better in 2024, the name of the game for president of baseball operations Alex Anthopoulos is getting the team better positioned for October baseball and the unique demands of the game in the postseason. 

And so, the Braves acquired Chris Sale from the Boston Red Sox, trading blocked infielder Vaughn Grissom to do it. 

Sale's one of the best pitchers of this generation when healthy, finishing inside the top five of Cy Young voting an amazing six times and adding another 6th-place finish to boot. He's MLB's all-time leader in strikeouts per nine innings, with a career mark of 11.1 K/9 (minimum 1000 innings pitched, or else Spencer Strider's 13.6 K/9 would take the all-time lead). 

And that strikeout prowess might just be even better in 2024. 

Sale added a sinker last season, a pitch that he threw early in his career and abandoned for a four-seam fastball in 2017. And the good news about the sinker is not only is it back, it's spectacular. 

Per MLB Statcast, Sale's sinker had the best movement of any sinker in all of baseball last season, with almost twenty inches of armside run. Unlike a four seam fastball, which is designed to counteract gravity thanks to backspin, a sinker does exactly what the name implies - drops on the way to the plate, as well as moving back to the armside to avoid barrels. 

Sale's sinker gets almost 30 inches of drop, 15% more than average, with 19.8 inches of horizontal movement, a full 27% better than the average sinker in MLB. 

MLB.com named it one of the filthiest pitches in all of baseball, but pointed out that they want him to use it more, as he threw it only 6% of the time in 2023.   

Why did Sale use the sinker so infrequently?

We broke down Chris Sale's arsenal a few weeks ago - he's a horizontal pitcher, with a slider that he can accurately land on either side of the strike zone or drop below the zone for chase. His changeup, mostly used against righties, also features an higher-than-average 18.4 inches of break, and his sinker serves the same function as the changeup against lefties. 

He just doesn't face as many lefties as righties - the changeup was used at a 13.1% rate last season, which tracks if you think of it as his third pitch and you typically face twice as many righties as lefties. 

Back when Sale was throwing a sinker as his primary fastball (2010-2016), it represented around 55% of his total pitches, but when he swapped to a four-seam fastball, that percentage cratered to around 10% before disappearing almost  completely. 

But now it's back, and it's spectacular.  

All told, it's an highly effective arsenal to generate swing and miss, and a fastball/slider/sinker (lefties) or fastball/slider/changeup (righties) grouping should be effective in the postseason. 

Now all that needs to happen is getting Sale there, healthy. He says he's the healthiest he's been in years, and if so, it's bound to be a great year for Atlanta. 

Braves now project to have best 2024 rotation in MLB

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