The Atlanta Braves and left-handed starter Chris Sale have agreed to a two-year extension worth $38 million, the team announced Thursday. Sale, recently acquired in a trade with the Boston Red Sox, will earn $16 million this upcoming season and $22 million the following year. The new pact includes a club option worth $18 million for the 2026 season.
As part of the trade, the Red Sox sent over $17 million in cash considerations. That left the Braves on the hook for $10.5 million of his 2024 salary. Sale’s previous contract also included a $20 million club option for 2025. The new deal, then, both guarantees and increases his 2025 pay.
The Athletic reported earlier this week that the Braves were slated to pay Sale, 34, just $500,000 this year, with the rest deferred until 2039. The new contract extension does not appear to include any deferred money, however.
Sale, a seven-time All Star, has been sparse in recent seasons. He’s appeared just 31 times since the start of the 2020 campaign. Nevertheless, the Braves have good reason to believe that, when healthy, he’ll be an above-average contributor. CBS Sports recently highlighted three statistics that support that thinking, including the following tidbit about his swing-and-miss tendencies:
It bodes well for the Braves that Sale ranks highly across the board. His 29.7 whiff rate was tied with Kodai Senga for 20th best among starters. His in-zone contact rate — a fancy way of seeing if a pitcher is capable of overmatching batters within the confines of the strike zone — ranked 24th. Sale also had the eighth-best chase rate among starters, indicating that he’s capable, too, of enticing batters to expand their zones in pursuit of his pitches.
The Braves — winners of an MLB-best 104 games in 2023 — will field a rotation that includes Sale, Spencer Strider, Max Fried, and Charlie Morton. Fried and Morton could depart after the 2024 season.
