Chris Sale’s Rarest of Mistakes

Chris Sale is unusually skilled at throwing a baseball left-handed. This process is not generally viewed as aesthetically pleasing, but it is generally effective. It is particularly so against left-handed hitters. This effectiveness is why anything else is noteworthy, and thus why you are reading an article about Sale giving up his first home run to a left-handed hitter since 2012, and then his second such home run three innings later. Oh, right: Eric Hosmer hit two home runs off of Chris Sale Friday night, which is two more homers from the left side than Sale has given up over more than three seasons.

Chris Sale has been phenomenal against left-handed batters well beyond the fun fact of “no home runs allowed since 2012.” In his career he had allowed three total homers by lefties prior to Friday, with a triple slash of .202/.261/.263, all while playing half his games in the bandbox that is US Cellular. This dominance has not gone unnoticed by the rest of the league, and he has become justifiably feared by left-handed hitters and all-handed managers. During his 104 start, 712 inning homer-less streak, he has only faced left-handed hitters 18% of the time, despite batters hitting from the left batter’s box account over 40% of all plate appearances. Only the best face Sale. For perspective, Clayton Kershaw has had 609 plate appearances against left-handed batters since 2013 and has allowed eight home runs. For more perspective, it only took Bartolo Colon 246 plate appearances to hit his first home run.

For his part, Eric Hosmer was not a particularly likely player to end Sale’s streak, let alone to do so in this fashion. He has not yet had a 20-home-run season, and he has now matched his career-high season home-run total against left-handed pitching with five. He went into Friday with three career multi-home run games. If you care about this sort of thing, Hosmer’s numbers against Sale before then were relatively impressive in a small sample: .333/.351/.361 over 37 plate appearances. He is now tied with teammate Alex Gordon for most hits against Sale by a left-handed batter.

Now that we have established why Hosmer’s two home runs off Sale were unlikely to happen, we should look into the homers themselves. But before we get into the actual at bats, here is a plot of Sale’s pitches vs. Hosmer. I do not believe it hard to guess which cluster contains the two big mistakes.

The first at-bat came in the first inning, with two out and nobody on. Sale started with a fastball off the plate away, then a slider more off the plate away. Down 2-0, this happened:

With a low and away target, Sale left a fastball high and over the heart of the plate. Hosmer crushed it the other way.

Hosmer’s second at-bat led off the fourth inning. Sale started Hosmer with another fastball, equally over the middle of the plate and about four inches higher than the one that went out to left three innings earlier. The target was again low and away. The second pitch was a slider off the plate away, taken for a ball. Third, a slider inside and at the knees that went foul. Fourth, a fastball off the plate inside that Hosmer deflected just enough to hit into his own leg. With the count 1-2, this:

With a low and away target, Sale left a slider high and over the heart of the plate. Hosmer crushed it the other way. Sound familiar?

Hosmer did have a third at-bat against Sale in the fifth inning, and it progressed much as Sale’s interactions with lefties usually do. Called strike one on a low-ish slider, swing through a low slider, then weak contact on a changeup low and in off the plate. Three pitches, all strikes, and a routine groundout.

Contrary to the past three years of evidence, Chris Sale is not immune to left-handed slugging. Specifically, he cannot groove a fastball in a hitter’s count nor hang a slider in any count without expecting that bad results might occur. Eric Hosmer is good enough to punish those sorts of mistakes, and he proved it. He should get credit for that. But the last place a pitcher wants to miss is high and over the plate, and Chris Sale did that twice to the same hitter in the same game. These are certainly not the only such mistakes Sale has made against a left-handed hitter since 2012, but they are certainly the first two to be punished fully. It could be a while before we see the next two.