Chris Sale has needed to counter Cristopher Sanchez, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Brandon Pfaadt, Gerrit Cole, and Jacob Misiorowski in the last month. While the Braves haven’t beaten them all with Sale leading the way, the results have been terrific.
How about 67 strikeouts, 4 walks and 1 home run allowed in 52 innings pitched in the second half? He had a second half FIP of 0.88 coming into last night’s game. My back-of-the-envelope math says it is 1.23 right now. I checked back to 1974, which is far as I could
check via Fangraphs. That is the lowest second-half FIP of any Braves starting pitcher in that time span. I mean, Greg Maddux was transcendent, but he can’t hang with a 67/4 walk-to-strikeout ratio (at least not very often). Though a 1.23 FIP is not the lowest in the second half for players with 20 innings pitched. Paul Assenmacher has a second half FIP of 0.78 in 1989. He somehow didn’t give up a dinger in that huge home run year.
So is Chris Sale having the best second half season in Braves history? The first player that I thought might have beaten it was John Smoltz in 1991. But I feel that his second half felt amazing because of how poor he was in the first half, and he helped lead the Braves to the World Series. If his run continues, I think it might be Sale’s honor to grab and maybe pick up another Cy Young in the process.
