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Red Sox will treat Chris Sale like he’s pitching at the beginning of the season in his return
Sale will make his first MLB start in two years on Saturday.
The long-awaited return of Chris Sale to the Red Sox rotation will happen on Saturday. Boston’s lefty ace will play in his first MLB game in nearly two years to the day when he starts Saturday’s game against Baltimore.
Sale spent roughly the last month in the minors, making five rehab starts in preparation for his big league return. While Sale is 17 months removed from Tommy John surgery in March 2020, the Red Sox are still being a bit cautious in his return.
“It’s April for him. It’s April,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora told reporters Friday on his plan for Sale’s first start back. “We’ll take care of him early on. That’s why it’s the extra days (of waiting). It’s going to get to a point that he pitches regular days and he’s a full go.”
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Once Sale gets on the mound at Fenway, the big question will be whether or not he looks like his former self. In his last rehab start with Triple-A Worcester, Sale struck out eight hitters and didn’t allow a run over 4 2/3 innings pitched. Sale’s fastball traveled between 91-96 miles per hour, getting opposing hitters to swing and miss on 16 pitches, most of which came off his slider, according to The Boston Globe’s Alex Speier.
Whether Sale has his “stuff” or not isn’t the biggest concern though to Cora.
“Of course we want him to win. Of course we want him to dominate, but it’s more than that,” Cora said. “It’s about this kid putting in the work — going out there and performing at the biggest level. Then, after that, we can talk about stuff.”
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Sale’s return coincides with Kyle Schwarber coming off the injured list to make his Red Sox debut two weeks after the team acquired him. Cora admitted that they were a bit more cautious with Sale than Schwarber because Sale’s still under contract for three more seasons.
The return of both players also coincides with the Red Sox playing their worst baseball of the season. Boston’s 3-11 in its last 14 games, losing its top spot in the AL East, and is now just hanging on to the AL’s final wild-card spot.
Cora acknowledged that Sale and Schwarber are big additions to the slumping Sox, but it won’t matter if the rest of the team still fails to execute.
“We’ve been talking about this for a while now, it’s right here right in front of us,” Cora said. “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. “We have to perform. There’s a lot of guys in that clubhouse that have struggled the last few weeks, either offensively or defensively, pitching-wise.”
“We just got a good hitter, we’re gonna get a great pitcher, and we’re gonna keep adding throughout the week, most likely, but at the end, it’s what you do on the field,” Cora added. “We do believe we can do it on the field, but we can talk all we want, we can say all the right things, we can be polite about it and say, ‘Yeah we feel great about it.’ But until you go out there and do it for nine innings and win ballgames, it’s just talk.”
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